The Brewers Association Wrestles with Buy-Outs

If I could have teleported into Philadelphia for just one event in the Craft Brewers Conference (CBC), it would have been the one where the Brewers Association (BA) addressed the wave of buyouts over the past two years. It sounds like it was every bit as fascinating as I'd hoped. The situation, as you all know, is that the largest and most successful American breweries are ripe for acquisition by bigger international players. And that has happened in dramatic fashion, with nearly 30 sales in the past year and a half. The BA is a trade organization, and was set up to advocate for small brewers. As the most influential members of that organization leave--to the very competition BA has protected its members from--it represents a serious crisis for the organization.

Brewers Association Director Paul Gatza addressed the CBC on Thursday. He did the only thing he can do--parse between the deals that are bad for his membership and those that are (at least for now) relatively benign. Chris Funari:

“Private equity investments are different,” he said. “The company doesn’t get the market access benefits or the ingredient access benefits. It feels like it is more a form of banking.”

source

As more money pours into the space and as savvy business-minded investors become craft brewery operators, the deep passion for brewing — which has long been a cornerstone of craft and a major reason for the category’s impressive growth spurt in recent years — is becoming less of a focus, Gatza argued. “It feels like its differing and it feels like we’re losing some of that,” he said.

And it views even small labels owned by bigger companies as a threat on a different scale than that presented by private equity. Even knowing that private equity’s passion might lie more closely to business than to brewing, the BA still regards investments from that sector as potentially less harmful to the overall craft universe, however.

Although this seems awkwardly legalistic, it's fundamentally accurate. The BA wandered into the weeds when it tried to clothe itself in the language of heroism (craft beer as a revolutionary social change). But its role as a protector of the little guy is critical for an open, healthy market. And in this regard, BA really does travel with the angels. Here's what at stake:

Part of the reason these acquisitions are such a threat is their impact on access to raw ingredients and distribution networks. As the largest brewer in the world, ABI can buy ingredients in much larger quantities (for much cheaper prices) causing availability issues for small craft brewers. In addition, ABI owns a significant portion of the American distribution network, outright owning distributors in 10 states and having significant influence over their distributor network nationwide.

“What is needed is a truly independent beer distribution system” said Pease. “Anheuser-Busch InBev has rolled out an incentive program… that basically aligns their distributors not to sell brands that are over 15,000 barrels in their house. We have no problem with Anheuser-Busch InBev incentivizing their distributors to sell more of their own product, but for them to incentivize distributors not to sell other products is something we want to see remedied.”

Consolidation does pose real dangers, and in the coming years, the Brewers Association is going to be the blade edge leading the fight. They were caught flat-footed by the recent buyouts (which were entirely predictable), but now they have become a given. The BA's going to have to give up being a champion for that nebulous concept of "craft beer" and retrench for the fight for small beer. That's the battleground of the future.

The Future of Beer is Hiding in the Footnotes

For decades, folks in Denver have been tracking the growth of craft beer and the size of American craft breweries, and each year the Brewers Association releases figures on both. This has become an increasingly difficult exercise in recent years, however, because many of the flagship breweries making craft beer have changed their organizational structures to better compete in the marketplace. And that puts them outside the Brewers Association defintion.  According to the revised definition, the Brewers Association says a craft brewery is "small, independent and traditional." (I'd have liked an Oxford comma in that definition, but that's a different debate for a different time.)

Craft beer is, tautologically, beer made by craft breweries. But 2015 was the year that brewing broke "craft beer." The once-elegant dichotomy between craft and noncraft, fraying at the edges since the formation of Craft Brewers Alliance, was shattered with brewery acquisitions, mergers, sales of minority stakes, and mission creep into non-beer products.

As usual, April heralds the annual Brewers Association list of largest breweries. The most startling element of this year's tally is how many breweries have a small letter appended after the name. Those footnotes connect to a description of the compromises and deviations from the pure essence of "craft brewing" each brewery has taken. (I'll include the entire, extremely long list in the first comment below this post.) In other words, these are in some sense all "crafty" breweries. And even with all those footnotes the BA elided some of the changes by failing to notice sales of minority stakes--which I've addressed by adding an asterisk.

So, of the largest 25 breweries in the United States, how many unambiguously meet the definition of "craft?" Six.

Rk	Brewing Company
1	Anheuser-Busch, Inc (a)
2	MillerCoors (b)
3	Pabst Brewing Co (c)
4	D. G. Yuengling and Son
5	Boston Beer Co (d)
6	North American Breweries (e)
7	Sierra Nevada Brewing Co
8	New Belgium Brewing Co
9	Craft Brew Alliance (f)
10	Lagunitas Brewing Co (g)
11	Gambrinus (h)
12	Bell's Brewery, Inc (i)
13	Deschutes Brewery
14	Minhas Craft Brewery (j)
15	Stone Brewing Co
16	Sleeman Brewing Co (k)
17	Ballast Point (l)
18	Brooklyn Brewery
19	Firestone Walker (m)
20	Founders Brewing Co*
21	Oskar Blues Brewing (n)
22	Duvel Moortgat USA (o)
23	Dogfish Head Craft Brewery*
24	Matt Brewing Co (p)
25	SweetWater Brewing Co*

This is not a list of the largest American breweries, it's an obituary for "craft brewing." It demonstrates that a mature market is not one in which the big players are "small, independent and traditional." No amount of fiddling with the definition will ever repair this breach, either--because "craft beer" won. It has become mainstream and is in the process of entering the mass market. And companies that make hundreds of thousands of barrels of beer a year need to use all the advantages size affords. So of course "craft breweries" now look a lot like "macro breweries." The difference between the former craft and macro segments never had anything to do with beer, it had to do with size.  The absurdity of a list that has to include a 300-word footnote to account for all the complexity in a market makes this reality explicit. We have entered the post-craft era; welcome to the future.

Craft beer is dead. Long live beer.

Two Odd Things

Odd Thing #1: Biggest Breweries List
Each year, the Brewers Association releases lists of the biggest US breweries--and today they put out the 2014 lists. The first one contains all breweries, the second one "craft breweries." But that second one is becoming increasingly bizarre and baroque. Let's just compare/contrast:

• Craft Brewers Alliance, an association of three independent craft breweries with a minority stake by Anheuser-Busch, is not on the list.
• The Belgian conglomerate Duvel Moortgat, owner of Boulevard and Ommegang, Gambrinus, an importer that owns a menagerie of beer companies, and North American Breweries, owned by--not making this up--Cerveceria Costa Rica, a subsidiary of Florida Ice and Farm Company, are all on the list.
• Yuengling and August Schell are on the list--after years of being excluded.
• Boston Beer, a giant company that makes Twisted Tea and Angry Orchard, is on the list.

The "craft brewers list" is nothing of the kind: it's a "Brewers Association list." I hope journalists completely ignore it when they talk about relative size and refer only to the list of all breweries. It's the only one that has any meaning whatsoever.

Odd Thing #2: Powdered Alcohol
A bill in the Oregon state legislature would ban powdered alcohol, which was recently approved by the FDA.  Apparently this is a thing, powedered alcohol. The company that brought it to market, is vigorously (but in my view not entirely effectively) fighting back. Their arguments include: 1) if you ban it, people will want it more; 2) once the black market gets going, you'll lose control of it; 3) don't waste precious government money fighting the black market!; 4) Alcohol is... well, this argument is so nakedly self-serving it deserves a quote in full.  "Alcohol misuse and abuse is a real problem. People can abuse any product and there's no controlling what a person does with a product. What's the solution? We know that you can't legislate behavior so banning Palcohol is not the solution. We have to educate people on the responsible use of alcohol."

I have no opinion on the matter except that the Palcohol company needs to hire a decent political strategist and communications director immediately.  

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.

Evolving GABF Style Guidelines

The Brewers Association has new style guidelines out, and in a couple weeks, I will return to them for some more meaty analysis.  For the moment, have a look for yourself (.pdf).  There are some significant changes to the methodology to go along with the usual adjustments and additions. 

• There are now more "American-style" beers listed than beers from any other national origin.
• There are 35 subtypes listed under the catch-all "hybrid" category, more than lager subtypes (30)
• Bamberg gets a lot of love: four subtypes reference the city.  (No other city, including Munich, is listed more than twice)
• Countries now referenced as origin points for styles: England, Scotland, Ireland, US, Germany, France, Belgium, Poland, Netherlands, Australia, Czech Republic, Austria (sort of--Vienna lager), and Japan--plus "Baltic-style," "Australasian," "Latin American," and "indigenous."

Australasian for bee-ahr.

The last thing I'll leave you with is this statement in the preamble to the rules.  It is, more than anything else, a distillation of the American view of brewing.  I have no problem with that as far as it goes--each country has very different brewing philosophies--but because the GABF and World Beer Cup are so influential, I do despair that this view should infect the thinking beyond our shores.

Each style description is purposefully written independently of any reference to another beer style. Furthermore, as much as it is possible, beer character is not described in terms of ingredients or process. These guidelines attempt to emphasize final evaluation of the product and try not to judge or regulate the formulation or manner in which it was brewed, except in special circumstances that clearly define a style.

Go have a look and share your thoughts.

The Brewers Association Evolves

Yesterday morning, the Brewers Association (BA) announced some changes.  This is pretty deep-weeds stuff for most beer fans who mainly care about the beer, but no organization has been more effective in defining "craft beer" or promoting it.  The BA has done an amazing job establishing a clear, understandable vision for craft beer (one that has even affected beer markets abroad), and that vision has been the guiding light for the industry.  So yes, changes in definitions are deep-weeds stuff, but they may also have real-world effects in the way Americans think about beer. 

So what are the changes?  The biggies involve the definition of what a craft brewery is.  We'll get to the changes in a moment, but let's have a tiny recap first.  In the 1980s, when the BA's precursor organization formed, you had two kinds of breweries: large lager-making breweries and flea-sized new breweries that made weird stuff.  The gulf between the two was vast and unmistakeable.  For the first 15 years of "microbrewing," even the largest breweries were by any objective measure still pipsqueaks.  But then they started to grow and the lines blurred.   Taking a new name in 2007, the Brewers Association decided to define their membership as "small, independent, and traditional" breweries.

This definition reflected certain values, but it also provided a blueprint for membership in a world that was getting less obvious with mergers, part-ownerships, and super-charged growth.  The Brewers Association isn't an advocacy group, it's a trade organization representing the interests of its members.  There's always been a genius and structural fault with the definition of "small, independent, and traditional": it's both concrete and aspirational.  By combining values into the qualifications for membership, BA has given itself a dose of emotional energy.  The members feel they embody those values, and so craft brewing has taken on a mission larger than selling beer.  But values are incredibly hard to police, and as brewing gets bigger and more complex, that element will be harder and harder to define. 

But enough preamble.  Here are the changes:

Small

Old: Annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less. Beer production is attributed to a brewer according to the rules of alternating proprietorships. Flavored malt beverages are not considered beer for purposes of this definition.

New: Annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less (approximately 3 percent of U.S. annual sales). Beer production is attributed to the rules of alternating proprietorships.

Indpendent

Old: Less than 25% of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by an alcoholic beverage industry member who is not themselves a craft brewer.

New:  Less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by a beverage alcohol industry member that is not itself a craft brewer.

Traditional

Old: A brewer who has either an all malt flagship (the beer which represents the greatest volume among that brewers brands) or has at least 50% of its volume in either all malt beers or in beers which use adjuncts to enhance rather than lighten flavor.

New: A brewer that has a majority of its total beverage alcohol volume in beers whose flavor derives from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients and their fermentation. Flavored malt beverages (FMBs) are not considered beers.

The biggest changes come "traditional."  The BA have already revised "small" once, bumping up the definition from 2 million barrels to six in 2010.  (Editorial comment: by no definition in the world is 186 million gallons "small."  That is, for example, five times the size of Budweiser Budvar, an international brand.)  "Traditional," the values element, is of course the most difficult to define, and now they've dumped the part of the definition involving adjuncts--which was silly, but at least made sense.  The resulting language, "beers whose flavor derives from traditional or innovative brewing ingredients and their fermentation," is word salad.  Traditional and innovative are polar opposites. As the notion of "craft beer" has evolved from a sense of recreating traditional European styles to one focused on experimentation, the values bullet point has collapsed into incoherence.  Now craft beer is anything that is traditional or the subversion of tradition. 

The explanation behind that change comes in the press release.  BA has finally come to recognize that the old dichotomy of "all-malt beers" and "adjunct beers" were political categories, not brewing categories.  They comment:

"The revised definition recognizes that adjunct brewing is quite literally traditional, as brewers have long brewed with what has been available to them."

This comes off as a beat-up-the-BA post, but that's not really my point.  The Brewers Association has been instrumental in promoting the idea of local, high-quality beer in the US.  The result of their work has been a massive boon to beer drinkers everywhere.  What I find interesting in these changes is how they reflect on the changing world of craft brewing.  In the 1980s, there weren't very many styles of beers and it was easy to tell the difference between Budweiser and the corner brewpub.  In 2014, the differences are less obvious.  The biggest craft breweries have multiple plants and sell millions of barrels of beer, just like Budweiser.  (Sure, they sell a lot less beer than Bud, but let's not kid ourselves by characterizing them as "small.")  Many craft breweries have complex ownership structures, just like Budweiser.  (Some of them are even owned, wholly or partly, by Budweiser.)  And now breweries make beer out of so many ingredients--ingredients that would have seemed scandalous 25 years ago--that trying to distinguish between part-corn Miler and a part-corn blueberry saison is untenable, at least when you're defining membership.

The real point isn't that the Brewers Association is fickle, but rather that the nature of beer, constantly in flux, means their membership rules are also going to be constantly changing.  The rules trail along, trying to keep up with the changes in brewing.  Because BA is the main mouthpiece of American craft brewing, those changes also signal the evolving identity of American brewing.  And that is always fascinating.

This Year's GABF Comes with an Asterisk

Note: post has been updated below.

Wow, what a debacle:

On Tuesday, the Brewers Association opened brewery registration for The Great American Beer Festival. Each year, the registration list fills up within days. Last year, it only took two days for 580 breweries to sign up. This year, however, it only took less than two hours for 600 breweries.

Complicating this year’s registration were server issues, something that has become quite common with limited events.

I don't know that I have a lot to add to this except the pretty-obvious observation that things are soon gonna have to give.  Each Spring the Brewers Association proudly announces the hundreds of new breweries that opened in the US, and each autumn they announce the "best beers" in the country--even though this year only about a quarter will even have had the chance to have their beer judged.

They may have to move from an "open" model of competition to an "invitational."  The crapshoot model accomplishes no one's benefit.


Update.  In comments, Vasili Gletsos, brewmaster at Laurelwood, offers a wonderful solution to all this:

Maybe move to a model similar to what they do for their National Homebrew competitons? Have a series of Regional Competitions that advance to nationals.

Yup, that's the answer.  Regional judging could be accompanied by small regional events as well, which would certainly be a boon all around.  Brewers Association?

What the Brewers Association Did With Adambier and Grodziskie

Update.  When I wrote this post yesterday, Ron Pattinson hadn't commented on the Brewer's Association guidelines.  But he has now, so you should go to the source.

Source: Homebrew Chef

The Brewers Association has decided to include Grätzer/Grodziskie* and adambier as new styles for the purposes of judging in the GABF and other festivals.  This is a curious endeavor.  It's one thing to use guidelines for styles that have a historical through-line; current incarnations represent the best example of what we understand the style to be.  Porter, for instance, refers to a moderately alcoholic black beer with a roasty flavor, not a highly alcoholic, barrel-aged beer characterized by the vinous note of brettanomyces, as would have been the case 200 years ago.  But pick up a style that ceased to exist--especially one like adambier, which went extinct decades ago--and you are confronted with the question of which incarnation to pick.  So what did the Brewers Association do?

Grodziskie
Grodziskie, a fairly well-documented style, was a lot of different beers over the years. This is how BA describes it:

Grätzer is a Polish-Germanic pre-Reinheitsgebot style of golden to copper colored ale. The distinctive character comes from at least 50% oak wood smoked wheat malt with a percentage of barley malt optional. The overall balance is a balanced and sessionably low to medium assertively oak-smoky malt emphasized beer. It has a low to medium low hop bitterness; none or very low European noble hop flavor and aroma. A Kölsch-like ale fermentation and aging process lends a low degree of crisp and ester fruitiness Low to medium low body. Neither diacetyl nor sweet corn-like DMS (dimethylsulfide) should be perceived.

Leaving aside the editing that paragraph requires (did a blogger write it?), I see a few issues.  The Reinheitsgebot comment is sort of salient in that the law wasn't adopted outside of Bavaria until the 20th century, but of course the style lived past 1906, confusing matters.  The kölsch comment is odd--what's the link there besides the fact that we're talking German obergärige (top-fermenting) beer.  But more to the point, where does the overall characterization of the beer--light smoke and hop flavors--come from?   It doesn't conform to any of the descriptions Ron Pattinson--in his usual painstaking way--has discovered.  For example:

Grätzer Bier, a rough, bitter beer, [is] brewed from 100% wheat malt with an intense smoke and hop flavour. The green malt undergoes smoking during virtually the whole drying process, is highly dried and has a strong aroma in addition to the smoked flavour.  (1914)

The starting gravity for that beer was just 1.028.  It's a post-Reinheitsgebot version, however, so maybe BA was thinking an earlier grodziskie.  Let's jump back a half century:

This bright, light, highly effervescent fine wheat beer is shipped far. It owes its peculiarities of the use of willow bark. It has a slight taste of smoke from the drying of the malt with smoke. Mashing is done by infusion, but willow bark is scattered on the cooler, and on the next day it is put into the fermentation vat.  In this way you create fermentation material from one brew to the next. The beer is well mixed and immediately filled into barrels that have a wide bung hole, which is bunged with straw. The beer is delivered to the customer in this state. (1867)

The source mentions isinglass for fining as well, and observes that "the willow bark contains tannin and a well known bitter substance."  Not very Reinheitsgebot!  One thing I'll note is that the older versions Ron found reference to were all hoppy as hell.  Ron also located a reference to modern Polish grodziskies just before they went extinct.  There were three varieties, a small beer, a 12 P beer of 3.5% alcohol (very low attenuation) and a 14 P strength version that was 3-5%, which indicates incredibly poor to just poor attenuation. 

All of which is to say that in over a hundred years of written descriptions of the style, Ron found none that looked like the Brewers Association.  The descriptions he found mentioned lots of smoke, lots of hop, low attenuation, high effervescence, willow bark, bottle-fermentation--none of which are mentioned in the BA's description.   So where'd they get theirs?

Adambier
This style seems to have made it to the 20th century, but barely, and it seems to go way back.  Here's what the Brewers Association has to say about it (again, with the atrocious editing):

Adambier is light brown to very dark in color. It may or may not use wheat in its formulation. Original styles of this beer may have a low or medium low degree of smokiness. Smoke character may be absent in contemporary versions of this beer. Astringency of highly roasted malt should be absent. Toast and caramel-like malt characters may be evident. Low to medium hop bitterness are perceived. Low hop flavor and aroma are perceived. It is originally a style from Dortmund. Adambier is a strong, dark, hoppy, sour ale extensively aged in wood barrels. Extensive aging and the acidification of this beer can mask malt and hop character to varying degrees. Traditional and non-hybrid varieties of European hops were traditionally used. A Kölsch-like ale fermentation is typical Aging in barrels may contribute some level of Brettanomyces and lactic character. The end result is a medium to full bodied complex beer in hop, malt, Brett and acidic balance.

Again with the kölsch!  (That style is essentially a modern one, and while it's fine if the BA wants to think of all North German styles as kölsch-like, fine, but nothing before 1900 bore much resemblance to modern kölsches.  Lagers didn't challenge them until Dortmund started cranking out the exports well into the 19th century, and so there was no reason that they would "kölsch-like," by which we mean low-ester, lager-like ales.)  But this wheeze aside, I think they got a lot closer to the mark on adambier.  Here's Ron:

Dortmunder Adambier was a strong, sourish top-fermenting beer. Wahl & Henius ("American Handy Book of the Brewing, Malting and Auxiliary Trades", 1902) has an analysis of the beer performed in 1889. It was around 18º Balling, 7.38% alc. by weight (9.4% ABV) and a lactic acid content about half that of a contemporary lambiek. In contrast to sour beers such as Gose and Berliner Weisse, Adambier, also called Dortmunder Altbier, was heavily hopped. It acquired its sourness much like Porter - through a long secondary fermentation. Bacteria in the lagering vessels slowly changed the beer's character. It needed to be stored for at least a year for this process to take place.

The weird thing about this is that while Weyermann's new smoked wheat malt has recently unleashed a torrent of grodziskies (ten or twelve, easy), who in god's name is making adambier?  Is this really a style we needed to be statted out?  What's next, joppenbier (also Germano-Polish!)?  Cottbuser?

I await your thoughts on this matter eagerly.
_______________
*Even the name is dangerously political.  Grätz is, of course, the German name of the town from which the style came, and Grodzisk the Polish.  Right off the bat you may sense the awkward politics.  Prussia, Jews, and the World Wars played a role in the history of the town (I've no doubt language and religion did, too), and I don't even want to think about which name is less loaded.  I'm going with the Polish, because the small town is now located in the Republic of Poland.

More Bud Blogging

I wish I had more time to post things like Ezra's 25 Most Influential Oregon Beers--or at least join him with a rebuttal list*.  But alas, you get links. 

First up, a fascinating long piece in US News and World Report on the battle between Budweiser (and later InBev) and Boston Beer.  It expands into a discussion of the direction of the beer market and is more thoughtful and researched than most things you'll read.  Sample pithy passage:

Both Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors employ "category space analysts," whose job is to visit a store like 7-Eleven and consult them on the optimal placements of beer on the shelves.

"They are doing the sets, they [say to a store]: 'We can do that for you,'" says Koch. "And then they can take my beer from eye level to the top shelf, which drops my sales rate in half."

One thing I have to admit--when the Brewers Association launched the Craft versus Crafty debate, they struck gold.  A few mooks like me gave a raspberry, but the BA effort has launched tons of friendly media reports.  This one in the US News even has a section header labeled "Big Beer Gets Crafty."

In a related piece, Goose Island announces that more production is moving to Bud plants:

To meet increasing demand from the national launch, 312 Urban Wheat Ale, Honker’s Ale, IPA and the seasonal offerings will be produced at Anheuser-Busch breweries in Fort Collins, Colo. and Baldwinsville, N.Y. Led by Goose Island brewmasterBrett Porter , Goose Island brewers will oversee the production of all the beers at the new facilities....

312 Urban Wheat Ale, Honker’s Ale, India Pale Ale (IPA) and a rotating seasonal selection of Mild Winter, Summertime or Harvest Ale are now available on draught nationwide. Additionally, those same beers will be available in bottles nationwide beginning this spring.

Things are going to be getting mighty interesting in the beer biz in the next five years. 


____________________
*I'm not sure there are 25 influential beers in Oregon's short good-beer history, but if there are, the list surely can't include eight pales and IPAs. 

Corn's Fraught Status

Pete Dunlop alerts me to what turns out to be a fantastic article on the question of "craft" beer by Jason Notte in The Street.  It's really worth a read if you're obsessed (as, obviously, I am) by the whole craft versus crafty debate.  But what interested me in this piece was how Notte honed in on one practice the Brewers Association frowns upon:

To avoid some messiness, the Brewers Association points to the fact that Yuengling uses corn in its mix and accuses it of cutting corners and trimming costs. The problem is, as fellow blacklisted brewery August Schell Brewing in Minnesota pointed out, older breweries founded by German immigrants tend to use a bit of corn in their recipes because they didn't have access to two-row barley from home and had to cut into the higher protein found in the native six-row barley. 

If you want the full details on that incident in brewing history, check out Maureen Ogle's indispensable Ambitious Brew.  She relates the fascinating story of how brewers pioneered the use of corn and rice to offset the crap quality of American barley.  It was more expensive, made the beer harder to brew, and was an all around pain in the ass--not a shortcut.  Notte points out that that's again the case, and further dismantles BA's reading of the "adjunct" debate.

Given how much craft beer snobs shriek and howl when it's even suggested that a brewery might change recipes when it expands, one would think they'd welcome a brewery such as Yuengling sticking to its original formula for all these years. Oh, and if they think Yuengling's cheaping out, check the price of corn after the biofuel push of the 2000s and compare it with the price of malt. Nobody's getting a break by subbing in corn....

[I]t takes a huge pair of stones for an organization that came into existence in 2005 to call a brewery that's been in existence since 1829, survived through prohibition and is still family owned "non-traditional." 

The status of character-sapping adjuncts has always been a fraught one.  Because, when it saps character, we hiss.  On other hand, there are tons of way to sap character.  Sugar works pretty well.  French brewers used to use potato starch to lighten their beers.  Of course, corn and rice can add character just as well.  I doubt very much, for example, that Steven Pauwels is using corn in his Tank 7 to save money. Corn is an ingredient like any other.  It is not morally suspect.  And it has been an unfortunate scapegoat in the attempt to come up with a definition of bad beer.  And yet, one can't ignore the fairly recent past and how corn was misused, either:

A railcar full of corn syrup in front of
the old Blitz-Weinhard brewery.