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.

The Beer Sherpa Recommends: Elysian Bramble On Saison

Portland Farmhouse and Wild Ale Festival
Saturday, March 29th 11am-10pm & Sunday, March 30th 11am-9pm
Saraveza, 1004 N. Killingsworth in the Bad Habit Room
More info

The beguiling saison, so seductive in its contours, so alluring in its possibility.  The stripped-down saison is a marvel of flavor.  With just pilsner malt and a modest gravity one can, through the wonders of farmhouse yeast, coax enormous character out of the beer.  And what character!  It's suggestive of fruit, spices, herbs, and flowers--any or all of the above.  For a number of years now, brewers have detected in these flavors the invitation to accentuate.  Why not add real fruit or spice or flowers to enhance the native qualities?  It's an unavoidable instinct; I have been gripped by it myself.

But the instinct is usually foolsgold.  Those amazing flavors come from the alchemy of fermentation, and they emerge clean and well-articulated when there's nothing to get in their way.  Once you start loading the kettle up with enhancements, though, you usually spoil the very thing that inspired the creativity.  Subtraction by addition.

But not always.  I'm a saison fiend: if a saison is on the menu, it's always the first beer I try.  On my recent trip to Seattle, I wandered past the Elysian outpost by the football stadium.  I scanned the menu, and eyed Bramble On with mild trepidation--but it was a saison, so there was no real choice in the matter.  I am pleased to report that not only was it one of the best saisons I've ever tasted, but one of the best beers.  An absolutely spectacular saison.

So what did Elysian do right?  To begin with, its saison rusticity remains intact--even though it was a fruit saison, the esters shone through.  At 5.6%, it was a small enough beer that the elements remained in balance.  Blackberries are hard to work with--they have a lot of acidity and their flavor can be dodgy.  Here that worked to the beer's advantage.  The berry flavor was quite subdued (and the beer was dry), but they added a lactic-like tanginess.  I don't know anything about how it was made, but there seemed to be a hint of funk, as if kissed by wild yeast.  Finally, it has an earthy note underneath that gives it depth and structure (the blackberry seeds?).  You should always have at least a pint before rendering judgment on a beer; sometimes first impressions deceive and by ounce 9 you're starting to hate the beer.  With Bramble On, the opposite happened.  By the last drop, I was sorely tempted to get a second.  But I was in Seattle for beer drinking, so I passed. A decision I regret to this day.

Portlanders will get a bite at this luscious apple come the 29th, for it will make an appearance at the Farmhouse and Wild Ale Fest at Saraveza.  There's a ton of interesting-sounding beer there, but do yourself a favor if you go and try the Bramble On. 

"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.

Review - Elysian Night Owl

Long, long ago, in a land--well, in this land--it was the case that summer was the primo beer season. Mystifyingly. (As I now know--and probably you do, too--that's when the bulk of beer is sold.) But for beer geeks, the most interesting beers are those that go best with a cold day. For us, extra-pale ales are fine and good, but they can't hold a candle to the meatier, burlier beers that start appearing around Halloween. Fortunately, brewers seem to share this view, and they release scads and scads of specialty beers around this time of year. I have been working my way through some of them, and I'll try to do better about getting up respectable reviews.

Today's beer, Elysian Night Owl, a spiced pumpkin ale. Pumpkin ales occupy a class of Rodney-Dangerfield beers along with light fruit ales and chili beers--they don't get no respect. Yet they are popular, and people enjoy seeing them come around each year if for no other reason that to celebrate the change of season.

There's nothing about pumpkin that mandates a beer must taste like pumpkin pie, and yet this seems to be the near-universal interpetation of style. A light-bodied beer, usually malted with some Munich or Vienna malts to give it an orangey hue, and a handful of the usual spices--nutmeg, cinnamon, clove. Personally, the style is not for me. I wouldn't mind having an Oktoberfest along with my pumpkin pie, but combining the two seems unnecessary.

I took a flyer on Night Owl because 1) the brewery is one of the most trustworthy in the country, 2) it's been getting strong reviews this year, and 3) I haven't had a pumpkin beer in a few years and began to wonder if I'd unfairly maligned the style in my memory.

On the positive side, Night Owl is one of the best pumpkin ales I've ever tried. Lesser breweries will suffuse an uninspired beer with spices and call it good. Elysian played down the spice a bit and allowed the malt and squash to come out in the open. As an ingredient, pumpkin is nice--it adds a character not unlike malt, but a bit more bready; I imagine it contributes body as well, but this may just be my mind over-interpreting. The base beer is clean and well-made, if just a touch too light for my taste (though exactly like the other pumpkin ales I've tried). The spices are strong in the nose, but less so on the tongue--they suggest pumpkin pie without feeling the need to get mean about it.

I had it with a friend who loves pumpkin beers and he gave it very high marks. This, I think, is the key point: if you like pumpkin ales, you won't find a better example. If you wish you liked them and buy a bottle of Night Owl hoping to be convinced, good luck to you. No matter how good Elysian is, this is still a pumpkin beer. I'd rate it a B+ for style (and declare the style a dud).

Stats
Malts: Pale, Munich and Crystal
Hops: Horizon
ABV: 5.1%
OG: 14.9°Plato
Other Ingredients: nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, ginger and allspice; green and roasted pumpkin seeds, as well as pumpkin in the mash, boil and fermenter

Deschutes Anniversary Pils and Elysian Jasmine IPA

Pardon me for grouping, but I've got a pile of reviews cluttering my inbox, so here's a twofer on a couple of second-tier beers from first-tier breweries.


Anniversary Pilsner - Deschutes
Deschutes celebrates its 18th with a summer special in their Bond Street series. You may know this beer under its previous (and future?) name--Pine Mountain Pils. It took gold in last year's GABF in the European-style pilsner category, sort of the European Bud category--but with predictably more character (akin to Bitburger, for example).

Deschutes' version certainly looks the part. It is certainly one of the palest beers I've poured out of a bottle of Oregon craft brew--misleadingly of an industrial lager hue. As with an industrial lager, it has a nice head and effervescence. Actually, if you don't have the same visceral reaction I do to extremely pale lagers, it's quite attractive.

But somewhere in the transparent depths resides a true Northwest beer--hoppy, hoppier, hoppiest. It's a pilsner for beer drinkers who like IPAs and wish they had a tin-can beer they could tolerate. It is in fact a mildly-alcoholic beer, but it packs a lot of spicy Saaz bitterness. I'm shocked it won anything at the GABF--it's the kind of beer the folks in Colorado usually scorn with a dismissive "way out of balance." It is, and that's good.

(And thanks to Stumptown Girl, who offered the beer as a housewarming gift.)

Stats
Hops: "mostly" Saaz; malt: 100% pilsner malt.

Rating: good.


Jasmine IPA - Elysian
A lesser brewery, experimenting with dried jasmine petals, might simply dump them into a regular beer. Not Elysian, which leaves Immortal IPA alone and creates a wholly new recipe for its Jasmine variety. That's a good start, because Immortal's a bit rugged for the delicate essence of jasmine. But perhaps even the toned down recipe Elysian uses here is too brawny.

It's a straightforward-looking beer--a typical golden with a relatively quickly-dissipating head of fluffy white. The nose is floral, as you would predict, but rather mildly so. It's readily detectable (someone would identify it who didn't know it was the Jasmine IPA), but it's mild enough that it comes across as generically floral.

The flavors are even subtler. Malt notes come forward and, appropriately, hops take a backseat so as not to overwhelm the delicate floral essence. Still, the jasmine merely accentuates the malt, commingling in the palate, to seem like a flavor by-product of malts. A nice beer, but something of a novelty. I would love to see how jasmine would compliment a lighter beer, likesay a kolsh or helles bock.

Stats
Hops: Chinook, finished with Glacier and Amarillo; Malt: English Pale, German Munich, plus small amounts of German Carahell and English Crystal; Original Gravity: 1.062; Alcohol: 5.6% abv; Other: jasmine flowers added to the boil and hopback.

Rating: average.

Elysian Immortal IPA

I picked up a batch of Elysian at the store, lured by a remaining bottle of Bifrost Winter Ale. Seattle's Elysian has been one of my favorite breweries since they brought a batch of Elysee Saison to the Oregon Brewers Fest a few years back. I assumed they specialized in Belgians, but it turns out that's actually just one of many interests (albeit an exceptional one): their 14 beers represent British, Belgian, and German traditions, plus a dose of good old American innovation.

A few facts: Co-founder Dick Cantwell brewed at three breweries before Elysian (including Pike and Big Time), so he knew his way around a lauter tun. Although the brewery does bottle some of their beer, it was founded as, and remains, centrally a brewpub. I've visited their Capitol Hill location, and it's got that pub Feng Shui so rarely attained (eg: some of the McPubs, the Lucky Lab). So tasty are its beers and so groovy its bricks and mortar that the GABF named Elysian Large Brewpub of the Year in 2003.

Tasting notes
This is a beer that looks great on paper (see stats below), but doesn't sing like a few of the stellar Northwest IPAs out there. Things start out great: it is a rich, slightly hazy golden ale with a creamy white head. The nose is florally hoppy, almost perfumy (had I not been reading the webpage as I slurped, I might have guessed dry hopping).

On the palate, it's a nice, but unexceptional beer. It's balanced and pleasing, and not too rich to have a couple pints (I had the full 22-ounce bottle and it wasn't too heavy or alcoholic). However, in a world of BridgePorts, Terminal Gravities, and Walking Mans, Elysian's IPA is, sorry to say, merely mortal.

(I have a bottle of The Wise ESB in the fridge, and it is one of the most celebrated beers in America, so immortality is just around the corner.)

Stats
Hops: Bittering, Chinook, finishing Amarillo and Centennial
Malts: Pale, Munich, Crystal and Cara-hell
Alcohol By Volume: 6.3% by volume
Original Gravity: 15.5 degrees Plato/1.063 OG
BUs: 42
Other: The brewery has a homebrew recipe of Immortal, and the brewer is also a beer writer.

Rating
Good