Why Brands Matter

Falling down on the job here.  Two posts at All About Beer to note.  The first one concerns the importance of brands.

Let’s try a thought experiment. I’ll offer the name of a brewery and you notice the first few things that spring to mind. Ready? Sierra Nevada. Unless you’re really not into beer—and then, why are you reading this?—something should have popped into your head. OK, here’s another: Dogfish Head. Or here, try this juicy one: Lagunitas.

We have strangely complex relationships with breweries. The mention of a name produces a tangle of impressions, memories, opinions, prejudices and emotions. Unlike many product companies—soap makers, snack food companies, pharmaceutical firms—breweries inspire feelings. You’ve had a lot more meaningful experiences with a beer in your hand than, say, doing laundry.

The second tied into the first, springing up when owners sold Elsyian to AB InBev.  What kind of challenges to a brand do new owners pose?  Especially when part of your brand is "corporate beer sucks?"

It’s hard enough for small breweries to make the leap from beloved little-guy to corporate property without suffering some brand damage. For Elysian, a brewery where the brand relied heavily on that small, outsider status, the leap will be a good deal higher.

Read 'em if you missed 'em.

Good for the Brain: Xanthohumol and THC

File this under "random."  From the American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry comes this finding about an element in hops:

One compound found in hops, called xanthohumol, has gotten the attention of researchers for its potential benefits, including antioxidation, cardiovascular protection and anticancer properties. Fang's team decided to test xanthohumol's effects on brain cells.  In lab tests, the researchers found that the compound could protect neuronal cells and potentially help slow the development of brain disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

(The pdf--where you can read sentences like " this cytoprotection is mediated by the induction of endogenous antioxidant defense 522 molecules, which relies on the α, β 2unsaturated ketone structure in Xn and the transcr iption 523 factor Nrf2 in PC12 cells as removal of such chemic al structure or knockdown of Nrf2 524 abolishes the protection"--is here.)

But speaking of Alzheimer's, I recently came across the results of an even more remarkable study (bold mine):

“THC is known to be a potent antioxidant with neuroprotective properties, but this is the first report that the compound directly affects Alzheimer’s pathology by decreasing amyloid beta levels, inhibiting its aggregation, and enhancing mitochondrial function,” stated study lead author Chuanhai Cao, PhD and a neuroscientist at the Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute and the USF College of Pharmacy.

What that means is not only does THC guard against plaque buildup in the brain, but by "enhancing mitochondrial function," it may even reverse the process. And for what it's worth, this follows other (proper, peer-reviewed) research that found similar results.

So make sure that older loved one in your life has an IPA and tasty THC edible for dinner--it's good for the brain.

A Consolidation Dialectic (or Why Buy-Outs Do Sort of Suck)

A funny thing happened on the way Elysian's public flogging.  There I was, bracing for another round of "Judas" called collectively from the internet.  If 10 Barrel Brewing, a nice outfit but certainly nothing like the beating heart of Bend, could generate a week's worth of existential angst, then authentically beloved Elysian would surely cause Facebook to crash.  Instead, a somewhat large group went immediately on AB InBev defense--or made something like the "meh" argument.  I saw comments like this everywhere, but I'll single out the estimable Jordan St. John, who wrote one of the more entertaining versions on my blog Facebook page.

People buy the narrative of small underdog companies vs large companies and they are intended to do so because it plays on their innate acceptance of binary narrative even though it is patently not the reality of the situation which includes thousands of parts moving independently in a finite market.

Go look at the language in the comments of various websites who have reported this and tell me that the sudden hatred of Elysian on the part of long time loyalists is a rational reaction to the potential that the beer may shift in quality two years from now. It simply isn't. The craft beer narrative of the hero's quest and the idea that the "underdogs" must be the hero because there is an empire that they are up against is collapsing because the lines muddy when faced with what has always been a generational industry. It's the reaction to a hulk hogan heel turn or Anakin turning to the dark side. It's not the reaction to a potential quality shift that may or may not happen eventually.

You don't want AB InBev to own this brewery.  Really.

This leaves us in an interesting place.  The default position holds that buy-outs are bad for diversity, bad for the bought-out brewery, and bad for beer.  But there's a second sentiment, like Jordan's, which argues that it's all business and who cares who owns a brewery so long as the beer is good.  Can these views be reconciled?  In philosophy and logic, there's a concept known as "dialectic," which indicates a train of reasoning that flushes out bad thinking and gets at the truth.  There are many different versions of dialectics (it goes back to the Greeks), and it seems like we need one to interpret consolidation.  Allow me.

1.  AB InBev is not evil, it's just a company.
It's true.  AB InBev is a large company that (like small breweries) sells beer. Beer companies are morally neutral entities, and what they do is sell widgets.  To associate moral value with any brewery is to make the argument that there is a higher way to sell beer, and that's obviously not defensible. 

2.  Little breweries are not virtuous; like multinational conglomerates, they're just companies.
For reasons I shouldn't have to enumerate, I love beer.  But the notion that little companies are doing something categorically different than multinational conglomerates by making and selling beer is absurd.  They're breweries.  Smart people have decided to quit the idea that there's craft beer and then some other, lesser category.  There's beer and then there's, well, beer.  It's all made in breweries of malt, hops, water, and yeast (and increasingly, other things).  Companies that make this substance sell it on open markets.  Some are big companies, some are wee. 

3.  You can't judge the quality of beer by the size of the brewery. 
Fans of American craft beer take it as gospel that big companies make "crap" and little breweries make good beer.  This is not true.  Big breweries make beer that millions buy.  It may not be the beer I love, but that doesn't make it crap.  In many cases, mass market lagers are the cleanest and most consistent beers on the market.  One of the common stories told back in the 1980s was that big breweries used "additives" and chemicals to their beer--it was one of the arguments in favor of small-scale brewing.  I dunno, maybe some did (I'm no historian).  But as far as I can tell now, that's total hogwash.  Oh, and plenty of little breweries make pond water.  Like, literally.  I'm pretty sure I recall finding a pollywog in an ESB once.  Little breweries make plenty of crap.

4.  Big companies have a lot of power in the marketplace and don't love competition.
You have to be willfully forgetful to acquit Anheuser-Busch of being a malignant force in beer diversity in the 21st century.  There were 700 breweries following Prohibition, and A-B (and other giants) ran almost all of them out of business by 1980, when there were only 80 breweries left.  They did this by being bigger and more efficient, sure, but they also used bare-knuckle business tactics to dominate distribution, rig local laws in their favor, and buy out everyone they couldn't drive out.  Given a choice between competing against a few other companies in a stable market and competing against a hugely fragmented competition in a volatile market, they would--they have--chosen the latter.

5.  Local breweries keep traditions alive.
Companies are people.  Here in Portland, I know the majority of brewers in the city.  They're my neighbors and members of my community.  They employ my neighbors and other members of my community.  That alone is reason enough to at least be prejudiced toward local breweries, but there's a much more important reason.  Beer is one of the most varied products on earth, and that diversity comes from the preferences of locals who, say, favor dark ales in Dusseldorf and light lagers in Munich. There was a mass extinction following the Second World War when cheap, commodified beer displaced more expensive local styles.  Dozens of funky, interesting types of beer vanished from the earth.  Here's Frank Boon telling Belgium's story (from an interview I did with him):

“Forty years ago, this was a time when breweries were closing and all the local styles were disappearing.  Everywhere in Belgium.  Louvain white disappeared, Peeterman disappeared, [ascot beers?] disappeared.  In the 1950s and 1960s they switched to cheaper and technically better beer.  In every village and small town, brewers said the only thing we can do is sell the brewery.  There is no future for small breweries.  If gueuze had disappeared in the 1960s, nobody would ever have imagined to make such a beer.  It’s an absolutely crazy way to make beer.” 

There are cases in which the existence of one or two single breweries--Dupont, Schneider, Schlenkerla and Spezial--kept a beer alive.  These are never multinational conglomerates, but family breweries keeping traditions alive.  The more breweries there are--particularly funky little breweries that can make a living by selling niche beer--the more diversity that will survive.  Sometimes people denigrate the support for local breweries as mere sentimentality, but the consequences for losing them are not insignificant.

___________

To finally get off the ramble, here's the upshot.  Like Jordan says, it's best to avoid thinking of these things in moralistic terms. It's clarifying to recognize that beer is beer. However, that doesn't mean that one beer is as good or valuable as the next.  In the aggregate, we want a market where lots of breweries are competing to make the best beer.  Recent history has shown that consolidation isn't good for good beer.  Each brewery is a node in the diversity of the ecosystem--and some are more important than others.  10 Barrel?  Meh.  I'm not sure that they were really doing anything to increase biodiversity.  But Elysian, which was early on the scene with botanicals, which helped launch (God help us) the annual pumpkin frenzy, and which could make beers like this, had its own, unique flavor.  Those kinds of breweries are important, and it's perfectly reasonable to lament their absorption into a multinational conglomerate.

Anheuser-Busch's Purchases Elysian

Another one down:

St. LOUIS and SEATTLE (January 23, 2015) – Anheuser-Busch today announced it has agreed to purchase Elysian Brewing Company, based in Seattle, Washington....

Joe Bisacca, Elysian ‎CEO and co-founder [...] will continue with Elysian along with his partners, Dick Cantwell and David Buhler. “After a lot of hard work, we’ve grown from one Seattle brewpub to four pub locations and a production brewery. With the support of Anheuser-Busch, we will build on past successes and share our beers with more beer lovers moving forward.”

Wow.  Weeks ago, when AB snatched 10 Barrel, I observed that their strategy appeared to revolve around finding independent breweries with impeccable cred, and they could hardly have done better than Elysian.  It's long been my favorite Washington brewery, and it's always my first stop when I hit Seattle.  It has always seemed the most Seattle of the Seattle breweries--an extemporaneous brewery that could be equal parts gritty and urbane and credibly support local sports teams or indie bands.  Elysian always seemed to be right where Seattle was a the time.

Will this change?  I'm normally agnostic about ownership structures, but as a fan, this is at least a little alarming.  But as I've been saying for years now: welcome to the big new world of craft brewing.

 Update. Why does this rattle me--admittedly not a local, but local-adjacent?  A big part of Elysian's allure was how well they represented Seattle and the heartbeat of the city. Just because a brewery is local doesn't mean it can channel the local mores, culture, and zeitgeist. Elysian could and did--which is a big part of why they were so good. Can they still do that as a division of AB? In the short term, almost certainly. But I fear we've lost a little bit of what made Seattle Seattle.  Or put another way:

does it really? pic.twitter.com/jFlFqWf1oD
— Evil Twin Brewing (@EvilTwinBrewing) January 23, 2015

Beer Is Not Very Funny

The Onion's Clickhole is the latest to try to wring a smile by poking fun at beer.  But even the Onion can't do it.  It's a quiz to find out if you're really a beer snob, but the answers are strained and boring:

• I have a private mix of the song “Closing Time” by Semisonic where the line “Finish your whiskey or beer” is altered so that the word “whiskey” is bleeped out.
• One time, I was pretty sure I heard a statue say “Miller High Life,” so I had to blow up the statue with a bomb.
• Etc.

The one mildly amusing thing is that you must check every box to be called a snob--even all but one gets you "moderate" standing.  But beer's just not funny.  The key to comedy is surprise, and beer geekery is way still too obscure.  No one gets the in-jokes.  It's why celebrity comedy and observational comedy are always popular--you know the crowd is going to get it. 

We'll know beer has arrived when Stephen Colbert tells a gose joke and your father chuckles.

Experts Versus Hive Mind

As my weekly blogging over at All About Beer becomes a routinized thing, I'll alert you to posts more rarely.  However, you might be interested in today's post, which addresses the issue of expert opinion versus the wisdom of hive mind.  In terms of beer evaluation and review, I argue that we don't want to throw the former out entirely.

It is characteristic of this moment in American history that we hold experts in contempt and valorize the global hive mind. Critics are vanishing faster than tropical reefs, and we now rely on sites like Yelp and Good Reads and Amazon to tell us what to buy or read or patronize. There are many reasons why these sites have made us better consumers and, in some cases, better-educated. But the hive mind has a tendency to elevate mass opinion and codify conventional wisdom (even when that “wisdom” is grossly errant). The phenomenon is so pernicious it can even infect non-crowd-sourced information. If you trusted BeerAdvocate with the authority to decide on Burton Bridge’s Olde Expensive, you’d have been sent down a blind alley.

In making the argument, I pivot off the words of local beer luminary Bill Schneller, so go have a look and see what you think. 

Dive Bar Challenge: 'Reel M' In Tavern

Now that the holidays are safely past, it's time to get back to the Dive Bar Challenge.  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.)

Today's entrant is the oddly-punctuated 'Reel M' Inn Tavern.  It is located along the no longer scuzzy segment of Southeast Division Street, but stands testament to what once was.  (Indeed, after the inaugural Challenge, Bill Night suggested it as a "true dive"--and challenge accepted.)  At some point in the not-distant future, we'll get into the philosophical nature of the term "dive bar," but I think 'Reel M' Inn (henceforth "the Reel") passes muster.  It is the kind of place where, on a late Friday afternoon, you'll find guys drinking mass market lager and bourbon shots at the bar (two examples) while others choose rum and coke while feeding their video poker jones (one).  Another patron had a Hamm's tallboy, pulled from a case that has a wide selection of talls for the discriminating customer. The sole video game is played with a rifle. 

Its been a decade since I've been in the Reel, but it seems little changed.  Nevertheless, four of the six taps were local: Worthy IPA, Manny's Pale, Breakside Irish Stout, and something from Hop Valley. Here's your tale of the tape:

The Stats*
Breweries in ZIP code: 8
Distance from the heart of downtown: 2.6 miles
Neighborhood hipness factor (1-5): 2.5, transitioning
Seediness factor (1-5): 2, homey
Beers on tap: 6
Mass market beers: 2 (Coors Light, Pabst)
Craft beers: 4
Imports:  0
Ciders: 0
Verdict: Pretty crafty

Overall, the Reel has a lot to recommend it.  The bartender was super, and my stout was fresh and clean.  The guy next to me at the bar was friendly and welcoming.  Like so many dive bars, the music was retro, but well-curated, oscillating between louche 70s (Bowie and Steely Dan) to crunchy rock (Grateful Dead, Neil Young). It's been a decade since I've been in the Reel, but it seems little changed.  Except the beer.  Not only were two-thirds of the taps local (Worthy IPA, Manny's Pale, Breakside Irish Stout, and something from Hop Valley), but they were all high-cred local, not just gestures like Redhook and Pyramid toward a new, incomprehensible customer. The Reel is serving people who like good, local ales, and they've chosen taps to appeal to them.

________________________
*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.

Eugene, Oregon

In 1846, peripatetic New Yorker Eugene Franklin Skinner built a cabin on a rise not far from the upper portion of the Willamette River--which is, counterintuitively, two hours south of where it flows into the Columbia in Portland.  He was not special, particularly--the local Kalapuya Indians were local inhabitants and advised about where to place his cabin.  Nevertheless, it is his name--his first name, strangely--that now identifies the 44 square miles that constitute Oregon's second-largest city.  In 1872, the Oregon legislature selected Eugene as the site of the state's flagship university and, exactly 30 years after Skinner put up his cabin, the University of Oregon opened its doors.

Tonight the Ducks will battle perennial powerhouse Ohio State for a national championship.  I have no great confidence in their chances.  Oregon (the state) is spectacular at certain things, but they are never the things the rest of the country cares about. The climate of western Oregon is akin to a rainforest and produces tropical-looking verdant vistas. Consequently, people flock to sunny California.  Our beaches are arguably the prettiest in the world, bounded by spiky volcanic hills that tumble into the sea.  The water is, even in summer, icy cold, however, and so people ... flock to sunny California. 

In the world of sport, we are similarly offbeat, and this is relevant to tonight's game.  The Oregon Ducks are, without question, the most storied running university in the country and, 40 years after his death, long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine is probably still the most famous athlete from the state.  Our only two major-league professional sports teams are in basketball and soccer (where the fans are rabid). 

Oregon is nowhere near anything.  It takes ten hours to drive to San Francisco, which we think of as relatively nearby.  If you want to travel anywhere in the world except the far east--which to Oregonians is the near east--get ready for interminable flights and long layovers.  Even our weird name, which no one knows the origin of, is regularly mispronounced.  I once asked my dear spouse Sally, a New Englander, what she thought of Oregon before I convinced her to move here.  "We didn't think of Oregon.  Ever."  Okay.

Oregon likewise does not do big splashy things like win national championships.  The Blazers did win an NBA title, but it was during the 70s when the NBA was in its famous trough of popularity between the eras Cousy and Bird.  If Oregonians had wanted to win championships, they would have stayed in their hometowns of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago.  (Okay, Chicago's a bad example.)  Or Columbus, Ohio--now that's a championship town.

Oregon does have great beer.  Eugene was a laggard on this front, boasting only a smattering of brewpubs for decades.  Now, with Ninkasi, Oakshire, Falling Sky, and Agrarian, the city has proven its mettle.  For those hearts who pump lime green and electric yellow and sound like the distant call of a mallard, good beer may be the best thing about tonight.  Football championships come and go, but good beer is forever.  And who knows, if the Ducks win the championship, people may actually learn how to pronounce the school's name.

Go Ducks--

Update.  As the world now knows, the 7-time national champs beat the poor Ducks like toy drum.  They are now the 8-time champs and Oregon remains a championship-free zone.  Delay the apocalypse at least one more year.

The Scandal That Wasn't

Tony Magee

Last week, Guys Drinking Beer posted a most intriguing take on a $25,000 donation Lagunitas made to the election campaign of Chicago mayor Rahm Imanuel.

Lagunitas Brewing Company cut a check to Rahm Emanuel’s re-election campaign for $25,000. It certainly isn’t the brewery’s first contribution to a political candidate but is the most sizable contribution and the second time this year it’s dropped 25k on a politician.

It wasn't the only check the brewery mailed out to politicos:

In July, Lagunitas cut a $25,000 check to incumbent governor Pat Quinn (who lost to Republican Bruce Rauner). In September Lagunitas dropped over 10k on Alderman Patrick O’Connor. $9,225 of that was an individual contribution while another $1,275 was an “in kind” contribution of beer and appetizers — most likely for a fundraiser. Alderman O’Connor, who represents the 40th ward on the north side, is Mayor Emanuel’s floor leader.

And then there’s the Christmas Eve contribution of $25,000 to the mayor’s campaign. It brings the total amount contributed by Lagunitas to Chicago politicians, since July, to $60,500.

For the most part, the incident seemed to garner very little attention. Things like this were rare. Lagunitas's Tony Magee has 20,000 followers, yet when he discussed the matter on Twitter, just a few people responded.  (Mostly about how they hated Rahm, it seems.)  Given the scrutiny beer geeks give breweries, I was surprised by this.  Politics is messy and ugly.  There's always an aroma of quid pro quo about political donations--how could it be otherwise?--and that's the kind of thing beer geeks hate.

Having formally written about politics, this not only doesn't surprise me, it makes a ton of sense.  To ignore the realities of politics--which is to say the realities of public policy that affect things like zoning, distribution laws, taxation, etc--is crazy short-sighted.  And brewers have become much more politically engaged and politically savvy.  But still; I'm surprised it wasn't a bigger story.

The Good and Popular Posts of 2014

Thanks to the data that Google provides (as opposed to the data they keep--which I'd love to see), I have a pretty good idea of which posts attracted the most attention over the past year.  Google tracks "entry pages," which is a good proxy for post popularity. These are the individual post pages people are referred into--from other sites or internet searches--as opposed to coming to the main site. In the modern era, entry pages are referred largely by social media referrals.  Early in the year, Reddit was responsible for some of my biggest traffic days, but that site has become an anemic source of late.  Twitter remains my biggest performer, but virality transcends platform.

I've always described my blog as a garbage scow of information--you'll find some treasures and some rubbish, but it's a theme-free jumble. Actually, that's not entirely true.  If anything unites the content here, it's my proclivity for finding a tiny thing and writing a thousand words on it. It's what I like. One thing I noticed in looking through the top posts of the year is that readers tend to respond to the same posts.  I'm slightly embarrassed by my top traffic post of the year--keying off the idea, other people took the subject to far more interesting places--but the second-most popular post was my favorite of the year.  That post could become the coda to what I've learned writing about beer over the last five years.  It's incredibly reassuring to know that people like reading, more or less, the same posts I like writing. 

So here are the top click-getting posts of the year.  (I quite liked the last post, so it's a top-11 list.)  I don't expect anyone to click around much--I know these year-end posts are mostly ways to fill up space in the absence of news--but I do think there's some decent content there.  If you missed one of these, give it a look. 

1. GABF Analysis: Five States Won Half the Medals (5,851 clicks)
2. Zen and the Art of Appreciating Simple Beers (4,535)
3. How the Word "India" Came to Mean "American" (4,341)
4. The Goose Island Challenge (4,275)
5. When Naming Goes Awry (4,112)
6. Cider Saturday: How Angry Orchard is Made, an Interview with David Sipes  (3,280)
7. A Brief Primer on Czech Lagers (3,205)
8. A Bomber Bubble? (2,673)
9. A Hoppy Ale to Rule Them All (2,238)
10. Introducing "Hop Bursting" (Part 1, History)  (2,234)
11. Big Brewers Making Specialty Beer: Lessons from MillerCoors  (2,080)

For the completist within, I feel impelled to offer my own top posts, though after the first two listings, they don't really fall in order of preference. 

• Zen and the Art of Appreciating Simple Beers. The title mostly captures what the post is about, but there's an element of appreciating any beer in it, not just simple beer.
• A Brief Primer on Czech Lagers I am not the best tribune for Czech beer, but because of the staggering dearth of information (in English) about the world's greatest drinking country, I do my best to spread the news.
• Introducing "Hop Bursting" (Part 1, History)  and Hop Bursting, Part 2 (How the Brewers Do It).  Delving into a relatively new brewing technique.  This is the kind of content I think blogs were designed to deliver; it's hard to do them in any other medium.
• Big Brewers Making Specialty Beer: Lessons from MillerCoors.  I went to a tasting of the various small, specialty brewers under the MillerCoors umbrella and learned a ton about the chasm between the way big and small breweries make and sell beers.
• How the Word "India" Came to Mean "American." A slightly controversial post in which I posit that the word India/Indian, when seen on a beer label in Portland, Prague, or London, essentially means "really hoppy in the American mode."
• In Herefordshire.  This post came from my cider research trip to Europe, and I might have selected any posts from that series--but because I landed in Herefordshire first, my experience and the resulting post was the most vivid.
• Style Ontology and the Everyman Rule.  Beer geeks spend a lot of time obsessing over style, and I proposed a way of checking our instinct to roam too deeply in the weeds.
• Full Disclosure. My explanation of how I wrangle with the tension between brewery freebies and journalistic independence.
• Beer Sherpa Recommends: Elysian Bramble On Saison.  Reviews are mostly not interesting to people, and yet, I think it's important to continue to periodically put our critical apparatus to use in judging beer.  Beer Sherpa Recommends gives me a way of looking at a beer and a style more deeply.  I'm enjoying them and hoping others are, too.
• When Craft Becomes a Commodity.  It's not hard to imagine the rise of faceless "craft" beer sold, like mass market lagers, as commodities rather than crafted products.
• The Ease of Misunderstanding Czech Beer.  An echo of my favorite post of the year, but focused on the greatest brewing country few Americans know.
• I Have a Minor Complaint: The Bombers Are Too Damn High and There are No Good Arguments For Overpaying.  This couplet demonstrates another reason why blogs are still relevant: you can delve into a topic deeply and curate a good discussion.  Social media will never be especially good at it.  Here, the very debatable premise was: 22 ounce beers are priced to gouge customers.

I'll see you next year.  Everyone stay smart and safe tonight--

Update.  Responding to this post, both Stan and Alan listed their top-ever posts as measured by the algorithmists in Mountain View.  For what it's worth, mine are below.  I think there's some randomness to all-timers like these, in that some large outlet must have linked to them at one point and goosed the stats.  I don't know that you can take much away from the list per se (the third-highest was an April Fool's post).  Anyway, here it is:

•  Why Americans Don't Make "Lambic."  (8/9/13 - 15,474 clicks)
• Brand Dissection: Pabst Blue Ribbon. (10/1/10 - 14,205)
• Pope Francis to Trappists: No More Beer. (4/1/13 - 11,675)

The Year in Pictures

Over the course of a year, we mobile modern humans often range far and wide across this sapphire planet of ours, and our travels offer a tiny window into the currents and trends stippling the beer world.  At least among those of us who direct our gaze toward things beery.  As I ramble about, I take snaps on my wheezing iPhone 4 and post them to Twitter.  Below are a selection of the choicest cuts.  See what trends you can divine.  (Yes, cider looms large.)

My year started in Salem, as I joined EZ Orchard's Kevin Zielinski
as he milled and pressed apples.

 

It was then off to Europe on research for Cider
Made Simple.  First stop--Tom Oliver in Herefordshire.

Beer Invades the Metroplex

Note: Because it's apparently not clear in the post, Portland has had beer in theaters since at least the late 1980s.  The McMenamins may well have had the first theater-pub in the US when it opened The Mission in 1987.  Now probably 80% of the indies and local chains serve draft beer.  It is Regal, the Tennessee-owned chain, that has finally--at least in one location--decided to get on board.

_________________

I abandoned movie theater chains a decade ago. They had become too abusive: a high-volume onslaught of TV-style ads in the theater before the movie, sky-rocketing ticket prices, and concessions that were as bad as they were over-priced. Meanwhile, the proliferating indies offered ad-free viewing, low prices and--now almost uniformly throughout the city 4-8 handles of great beer and cider. I could go to the St Johns Cinema on opening day, grab a slice of pizza and a beer for barely more than it cost to go to a Regal metroplex. I was not alone. I watched as the traffic abandoned the Regal experience (a deliciously ironic name) and came over to the indies. 

Yesterday Sally and I decided to catch a Christmas Day matinee of the latest spectacular spectacular, but the indies were not available. (Good for them, giving the employees the day off.) So off we went to the Lloyd Center Regal and: ho!, what is this?

They haven't yet gotten to installing draft lines, but you can actually get a decent bottle of beer now. 

(1) This illustrates an interesting fact about the rise of drinking culture in the US. We no longer drink as much beer as we used to, but we like good beer when we go out to get a bite or catch a movie. This was never going to happen before craft beer came along. (2) Is this a thing everywhere, or just beery Portland, Oregon? My dataset is way out of date. 

Joy to You All

Hope the holidays are bringing you joy and connection to those you love.

I'll be taking the rest of the week off from blogging, but if you're absolutely dying for a bit more blogging, you can check out this mood piece of mine over at All About Beer.

Holiday ales are an old tradition. In England they were once literally warming—sometimes topped by a crust of bread or a flotilla of apples. In Franconia, as the nights turn chill, breweries turn to bock to warm their shivering customers. In Belgium and France, they enjoy strong, sweet bière de Noël, or, in some of the grote markts of the Flemish-speaking region, steaming mugs of glühkriek.

Happy yule/solstice/festivus/Hanukkah/Christmas/holidays to you all--

The Year in Beer

That time of year is upon us, when in the dark and cold and dearth of news we cast our gaze backward at the year to see what to make of it.  This isn't entirely in service of generating clicks--it is sometimes worthwhile to remind ourselves of events past and see if they tell us anything relevant about life in the present. 

January always starts slow, and because I was in Europe doing research for my cider book (Cider Made Simple), I was out of the loop.  Not entirely out of the loop, though; I did manage to catch the reports of a beer called "Mouth Raper."  A nice controversy to warm up a frigid month (with a follow-up here).  The incident sheds very little light on anything, except 1) that the sheer number of beers made each year means the likelihood of at least one of them offending people is 100%, and 2) people really, really take beer seriously.  Number (2) is a theme we shall return to in due course.

In February, the OLCC released final numbers on 2013, and we learned that a new crop of breweries are making some noise in the world.  The top-ten of best selling beer includes Ninkasi (#3), 10 Barrel (#7), Boneyard (#9) and Oakshire (#10).  On the other hand, four breweries accounted for half the Oregon beers sold in Oregon in 2013.

In March, the Brewers Association changed its definition of craft brewery and essentially scrapped the "traditional" element.  Pyramid came in for an assessment on its 30th birthday.  The horse having left the barn, both MillerCoors and AB InBev decided to close the door and released mass market ciders.  (An abstruse use of cliched metaphor, I'll grant you.)  Here on the blog we discussed hop bursting (in posts one and two).

Very little happened in April.  Seizing the moment, Nat West released his version of a Mexican fruit wine called tepache. 

In May, another brewery turned 30--Oregon's oldest, BridgePort.  I spent an odd afternoon celebrating this event with brewery members past and present and offered another consideration.  It was the month tragedy struck, as brewing pioneer and Rogue founder Jack Joyce died.

In June, Vani Hari's effort to get beer to fully label its ingredients came under closer scrutiny.  I still think her overall point is right, but she is a catastrophic messenger.  (And if you don't agree, this post is the one to read.)  I had a chance to sample the "craft beers" of MillerCoors and was surprised at what I found.  On the blog, we discussed style evolution in the US.

July is the month of beer.  There are seven million fests in Portland alone, and I spent most of the month with my nose in a glass of local beer.  News was happening elsewhere, though.  In a major theme for the year, brewery openings were astounding.  This article provides the numbers (headliners: brewery numbers have doubled in five year and over the past two years, 8.4 breweries open ever seven days).  Even Cantillon announced it was expanding.

Absolutely nothing of note happened in August.  Or perhaps just memory, which might better explain things.

September was personally busy.  I had the chance to make a lightning trip to the Czech Republic and also judged magazine articles for the North American Guild of Beer Writers.  Then at the end of the month, I went to Victoria, BC on a grand beer tour.  But news-wise, it was no more exciting in September than August.  I mean, this was major beer news:

We've all been there little buddy. "Skunk with head stuck in beer can rescued in Ohio" http://t.co/YtOQSXJuY8 pic.twitter.com/an3bgmooBn
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) September 17, 2014

October brought us the GABF and the realization that five states won half the medals.  It was the month that Ohio-based Fat Head's decided to open up a multi-million dollar brewpub in the most expensive real estate in Portland--which locals observed with slight mystification.  In other curious launches, Guinness put an amber ale in a wooden box and hoped people would shell out $35 for it.  Lagunitas managed to get a fresh hop beer in a bottle and, for at least 48 hours thereafter, it tasted like a fresh hop beer.  Hops native to the US and grown by monks went on sale for the first time, and a New Yorker cover caused a stir.

The last two months of the year have been dominated by an existential crisis.  It was precipitated by the news, in early November, that Anheuser-Busch was acquiring 10 Barrel Brewing lock, stock, and barrel.  It led us to question things like the soul of beer, and the meaning of craft. 

____________

Does any of this add up to anything?  I think it does.  I don't know how broadly the general public feel it, but 2014 ended with a note of unease about the health and long-term well-being of smaller, independent breweries.  (An unease I don't share, but a pervasive one nonetheless.)  The year started out with anniversaries of two early enterprises that have managed to survive the craft beer era--but which are owned by corporate conglomerates.  Just last week I noted that Founders and Surly are both in the midst of $40 and $30 million brewery upgrades.  As the year went on, we saw a staggering number of new breweries open, and the year was capped by the 10 Barrel sale. 

What we're seeing is the maturation of the market.  There's very serious money to be made in beer, which is attracting a lot of new entrants to the market.  What we're seeing are the first signs of consolidation as older breweries pass to new owners and aggressive mid-size breweries look for capital to grow.  Change is afoot and 2014 won't be an anomaly.  But no worries--with 3,000 breweries out there, surely you can find some beer to get excited about.

Are You Ready for Lifestyle Beer?

My latest post at All About Beer concerns a growing phenomenon in beer--and a brewery that serves as the perfect case-in-point:

The splash page for Saint Archer Brewing Co., a San Diego company founded last year, is curious. On a recent visit to the page, there was nothing but a six-and-a-half minute video that began in grainy black and white and looked something like the early French new wave. It turned out to be a short promo doc about a guy who makes surfboards in San Francisco. Wait, what?

Welcome to the most ambitious lifestyle brewery in America.

What's "lifestyle beer" and why is St. Archer it's patron saint?  Go have a look.

Never Say "Craft Brewery"

Yesterday morning, Mike Stevens and Dave Engbers announced that they would be selling 30% of their brewery, Founders, to the Spanish brewer Mahou.  The reason:

With Mahou San Miguel at the table, Founders Brewing Co. gets a partner with access to consumers on five continents and a chance to pay off investors who have helped finance the brewery’s rapid expansion....

Founders is No. 26 and climbing on the Brewers Association list of the nation’s largest craft brewers. It is also in the middle of a $40 million expansion that, when completed, will allow to make 900,000 barrels of beer annually.

The news came out on the same day I saw a nice article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about another large Midwest expansion:

When it hits full production, Surly’s new complex will fill more than 100,000 barrels annually — half of Summit Brewing’s capacity in St. Paul, but triple the capacity of the original Surly complex in Brooklyn Center and way more than any other brewery in town.... The final price tag of more than $30 million soared from initial estimates of $20 million. 

A large, independent, industrial production brewery.

The situations of the two breweries are not identical, and surely Brewers Association is going to have to think long and hard about whether to boot Founders from its membership roll.  But in one key way, I think we can agree that these breweries (and a few dozen more across the US) stretch whatever definition we might assign to "craft beer" beyond usefulness.  They are big breweries designed to produce beer efficiently and consistently--"industrial" plants by anyone's definition.  One passage I particularly appreciated in the Surly piece was a quote by brewmaster Todd Haug: "'Everything about the brewing process is going to be more precise and consistent,' he bragged, staring at computer screens that monitor every facet of his new tanks."  This is not the talk of a man hauling his own grain and whirlpooling his 3-barrel kettle with a canoe paddle.  (And there's nothing wrong with that!  Surly can make far better beer with their new system.)

It all gives me a chance to reprise a post from two years ago, when I argued for new and better definitions of American breweries that makes them consistent with breweries elsewhere:

• Brewpub/hausbrauerei.  A pub with a small attached brewery that makes beer for onsite sale.  The focus is the pub, with attention to ambiance and a full menu, not the brewery.

• Production brewery. a brewery that packages its beer for sale largely off-premise.  May have a tasting room, but this is a subsidiary function, unlike a brewpub where eating and drinking are the focus.

• Traditional brewery. a brewery that employs equipment or processes to uphold a certain tradition in brewing.  Decoction breweries, tower breweries, breweries with open fermenters, etc.  Not a precise definition, but I distinguish these from modern breweries that have been optimized to make any type of beer.  A brewery doesn't have to be old or small to be traditional, and traditional breweries don't always make good beer.  They are distinguished from industrial breweries (below).

• Industrial brewery. a highly automated and efficient brewing facility designed to produce beer as inexpensively as possible.  Again, nothing to do with beer quality.  They tend to be large, but not all large breweries are industrial and some smallish ones are.

• Independent brewery. Owned singly by one human or a family.  Nothing to do with beer quality, size, or brewery design (industrial versus traditional). 

• Nanobrewery. a production brewery with a batch capacity of less than three barrels. 

• Large brewery. Any brewery with an annual capacity of 250,000 barrels or more a year.  You want to place it at 100,000 or a million?  I'm mostly cool with that.  Either way, it's worth noting that when you look at the tens of thousands of breweries worldwide, only a tiny percentage of them make even as much as 100,000 barrels.  And a 250,000-barrel brewery is necessarily a pretty damn big facility. 

These terms are not mutually exclusive--they cover types of breweries, methods of production, and ownership structure.  Surly is an independent, industrial production brewery.  In no case do these definitions concern beer quality--and this is the really important point.  Americans, due to a trick of timing, have come to fuse the concept of beer quality with the type of brewery making the beer. It is an unexamined habit for many people to think of smaller, newer breweries as the holders of quality, while huge, national conglomerates invariably offer bad beer.  But "craft beer," whatever else it may have once meant, is now just a marketing slogan. With breweries as big as Boston Beer, Sierra Nevada, and New Belgium--companies now building multiple plants--the association between quality and size is even increasingly academic.

Since writing about these brewery categories a couple years ago, I would now add something about products, which is a distinct realm.  In this sense, "craft beer"--in the U.S., anyway--does have some utility.  More terms:

• Mass market lager.  Pale lager beer produced by national brands to satisfy mass tastes.  This is by far the most popular beer in the world, and most countries have at least one brand--Budweiser, Beck's, Asahi, Heineken, Corona, Snow, Panama, San Miguel--and on and on.  The beverage industry distinguishes between beer like Budweiser (domestic) and Corona (import), but that term doesn't have a ton of utility when talking about the actual products.  

• Alco-pops/flavored malt beverages.  Ever since Zima, a fringe of the beer market has been devoted to various sweet concoctions aimed at people who don't like beer.  It's not a big part of the market, but it continues to drive a lot of what the big companies are doing.

• Craft beer segment.  Contrasting mass market lagers, the U.S. market also has "craft beer segment" which is essentially anything that's not a mass market lager or flavored malt beverage.  Regular human beer drinkers understand it to mean everything from the corner brewpub to Sam Adams to Blue Moon and Shock Top. 

I've been getting better about talking about beer in terms of which segment it occupies, but less good about talking properly about categories of breweries.  Breweries themselves have always had a huge interest in defining categories in ways that help them sell beer, but as consumers and journalists, we should resist this.  Clear, unambiguous language about what breweries are and what kind of beer they make, unsullied by the jargon of marketing departments, is what we should aspire to use.

Trending

Google released their "year in search" today, which charts the trends in every conceivable area of interest.  That includes a top ten list for beers searched, but it isn't particularly illuminating.  They also have an interactive tool that allows you to plug in search terms and see how they've performed over time--and using that, we can glean more interesting trends.  It's that time of year, so I don't have hours to sit and play with this tool--but here are a couple interesting findings.*

 Let's start out with a comparison I did to track the two currents in the beer market.  The red line tracks searches for "Bud Light" (the country's most popular mass market lager) and the blue tracks "craft beer."

There are a couple things to say here.  The first is obviously to acknowledge a pattern we see in real life--craft beer is gaining while mass market lagers struggle to stay relevant.  (Coors Light, which is fading and less popular than Bud Light, is now trending below craft beer.)  But there's another possible interpretation.  Our minds tell us that if craft beer commands 10% of the beer sales, it must similarly command only 10% of all beer drinkers.  But that's always been wrong.  The heaviest users of beer (a small group) drink the large majority of all beer sold.  So when we see craft beer beginning to eclipse Bud Light in terms of search terms, this may be a better reflection of the actual number of people drinking craft beer than sales numbers.

Now have a look at generic search terms.  This is also interesting.  Among drinkers, the majority still prefer beer.  Wine is second and liquor third.  But search terms don't reflect consumption patterns.  Below are "wine" (red), "beer" (blue), and "liquor."  (I tried "whiskey," "bourbon," and "vodka" in place of liquor, but the trends were almost identical.  Also, essentially no one searches for "hard cider.")

What's more interesting is that "beer" is ticking up while wine has been in a slow decline.  (Also interesting: the annual end-of-year bumps that wine and liquor enjoy correspond to a drop in beer searches.)  This is harder to interpret, but worth a few minutes trying.  Theories? 

Last one.  This sort of speaks for itself.  I plugged in "Sierra Nevada Pale" (blue), "Lagunitas IPA" (red), "Sam Adams" (yellow?--colorblind), and that last one is "Angry Orchard."  No wonder AB InBev and MillerCoors jumped on the cider bandwagon, eh?

__________________
*Google searches are a proxy for interest--and therefore don't reflect reality perfectly.  Not everyone uses the internet, and those who do have idiosyncratic interests.  They're just Google searches, and it's easy to add meaning where none may be. 

Lessons From a 25-Year-Old Beer

Last night a group of friends and I cracked open the first bottling of Old Knucklehead from BridgePort--a beer dating back to 1989.  Back in the day, Old Knucklehead (OK) was a wonderful tradition.  The brewery honored a local codger (some famous, some not) by putting his visage on a little nip bottle.  It combined localness, particularity, and tradition all in one lovely little package.  (The brewery would do well revive the tradition, methinks.  It's hyper local tradition and wouldn't account for many barrels in absolute terms, but it would get a ton of press and continue a beloved tradition.  It's also perfect for the social media age.)

I have no idea who's on that first bottle--I think it was a regular at the old brewery.  Labeling standards were different then (no government warning, for instance), and the ABV isn't listed.  If memory serves, OK was a relatively low-alcohol barley wine--nine percentish.  All of which made analyzing it more dependent on what our senses could tell us. 

One thing you could tell right away was the clarity--even in the bottle.  That was a good sign.  When we cracked it, the bottle let out a nice pssst, and bubbles sprang to the surface.  Old Knucklehead was bottle-conditioned, and there was a thick layer of now-black yeast at the bottom.  Bottle conditioning is great for aging beers in the shorter term--the yeast harvests oxygen while refermenting in the bottle.  But it also raises the risk of autolysis (yeast cell degradation). 

 Twenty-five years is a long time, but amazingly, the beer had little flavor of autolysis and also not a ton of oxidation.  For those who like the effect of oxidation on high alcohol beers, this was an argument for the prosecution.  A tinge of paper, but mostly a rich, sherry-like note.  There were no hops left, but the beer was not overly sweet.  Some bread pudding and raisin, but balanced by the sherry note. 

The beer probably would have been better a decade or two earlier, but it was still surprisingly fresh and tasty.  People often ask me how long you can store beer before it's a lost cause, and I've always been reluctant to answer.  My data set--like most people's--is not flush with examples.  But 25 years is quite a test.  And this bottle, which was well cared-for in that quarter-century, held up remarkably well.

Bright and effervescent after 25 years.

Your Controversy of the Day

Submitted for your discussion: Maine, not Oregon or California or Colorado, is brewing the country's best beer.  That's the thesis of my latest post at All About Beer, and I'm only being very slightly hyperbolic.

Maine obviously can’t compete on numbers. The population is the lowest of any least-densely populated state east of the Mississippi, and most of the towns are crowded down in the south and along the coast. It’s only got 47 breweries. People acknowledge that it has good beer, but it’s never placed among the most glamorous and it won just a single GABF medal this year. Nevertheless, in the ways that matter, Maine is at the beery vanguard. Good beer has saturated the culture and pubs—as Bray’s demonstrates—regularly have interesting, unexpected beer. None of this was unfamiliar to me—it’s been this way for years. What was striking was the degree to which breweries are now pushing the envelope on innovation and quality. As an Oregonian, I’m used to measuring cities by the number of years their beers trail ours. Maine’s scene isn’t trailing anyone, though, and their Portland may now be the equal of Oregon’s Portland. Seriously.

Go read the whole thing.

We Like IPA and Other Findings

In the past couple years, the Brewers Association (BA) has really stepped up their stats game, a development I heartily welcome.  Today comes a quickie update on the year in beer, and three data points are worth closer scrutiny.

We Like IPAs
Sez the BA: "According to retail scan data, IPA is up 47 percent by volume and 49 percent by dollar sales, accounting for 21 percent volume share of craft."

One in every five beers we drink is some version of an IPA--and there's a good reason to believe this understates matters.  The BA relies on supermarket scans for these data (Symphony IRI and Nielsen), so they're not seeing what people drink in pubs or what they buy from specialty stores.  The figure is probably closer to a quarter of the craft beer sold rather than a fifth.

More interestingly, keep in mind that this is a new trend.  It was only three years ago that IPAs finally eclipsed long-time leader pale ale.  The ascendance of IPA is still an incipient trend, and who knows where it will finally level off.

A Lot of Breweries
BA: Breweries are opening at a rate of 1.5 per day. In addition, there are more than 2,000 breweries in planning....  In November, the United States passed the mark of 3,200 brewers in the country."

I continue to believe that, on the whole, the craft beer segment is positioned for strong growth over the coming decade.  But holy moly, that is one king-hell lot of breweries.  I suspect that there's more than a few poor business plans among them.  I wouldn't be surprised to see brewery closings start to spike soon.

Women Will Save Us
BA: "Additionally, women consume almost 32 percent of craft beer volume, almost half of which comes from women ages 21-34."

This is one of the reasons I've long been so bullish on craft beer in the US.  Despite occasional transgressions, craft breweries have been really good about offering a gender-neutral product.  They have neither alienated women with idiotic babes-in-bikinis ads nor condescended to them with idiotic products.  They've just made good beer and assumed women would like it.  Not-so-magically, that's what's happening.