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.

Big Brewers Making Specialty Beer: Lessons from MillerCoors

Multinational beer companies hire the very best talent they can find, and the brewers and chemists at Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors certainly have the experience and knowledge to brew any beer in the world.  But there's a real question about whether or not they're any better poised than craft breweries to compete purely on the basis of quality.

Last week, I had a rare opportunity to see what happens when a large brewery "unleashes" its brewers to make any beers they want.  In the case of MillerCoors, these are small, specialty-arms of the company that look just like craft breweries: the Sandlot, AC Golden, and the Tenth Street Brewery and Miller Valley Brewery (both in Milwaukee).  I was pretty psyched to see what their brewers could produce, and the line-up, which included six beers, four of them 8% and higher, was intriguing.  It is essentially the reverse of turning craft styles into commodity beer--it's when giant breweries attempt to make the kind of specialty beer that will never become mainstream.   The results were surprising and illuminating, and here are the lessons I took away from the experience.

Lesson 1: Good Beer Is Really Hard
I don't care how badass you are or how many letters follow your title: it's really hard to brew beer that is complex yet balanced, characterful yet drinkable.  You don't just whip up a world classic because you want to. 

Let's start where I started, with Sandlot's Wildpitch Hefe Weizen (4.4%). It was properly cloudy and had a light clove aroma.  But a sip revealed a problem: the malts were wrong.  It of course employs wheat, but that's only half the battle.  Wildpitch was thin and hollow, not soft and round.  A good weizen depends not only on wheat, but the aromatics and flavor of German malts, usually pilsner.  This beer, which was so thin it almost had a cidery quality, bore the telltale signs of American two-row.  One of the brewers, Addison Horine, was on hand and he confirmed the malt bill.  Nice yeast character, more clove than banana (as I prefer), but that wasn't enough.  

That experience was typical.  Like so many one-off craft beers I've tried over the decades, the beers had some fine qualities, but none cohered into excellence.  The others:

• Frederick Miller Chocolate Lager (5.5%), made with cocoa nibs.  Sally called it, accurately, a liquid Tootsie Roll.  It was well made, but tasted and smelled like Hershey's chocolate syrup.  Pleasant enough, but it didn't really taste like beer.
• Tenth Street Fragrant Fire (11.9%), a bourbon-aged "rye wine" made with Sichuan peppercorns, tien-tsin peppers, and Chinese mustard seeds.  A strange melange that I actually  enjoyed.  The whiskey and spice harmonized in an odd but pleasing way (though they didn't please Sally)--sort of like a gingery rum cake.  A worthy experiment.
• Tenth Street Big Eddy Stout (10.5%), a blend that had aged in bourbon barrels one and three years.  The base beer was slightly thin on the palate, but suitably velvety and only inflected--not saturated--in bourbon.  But here's the really shocking part: it had quite a bit of brettanomyces.  Nowhere in the description did it mention this, nor in my discussion with the MillerCoors people.  I assume it was a wild infection people were just pretending didn't exist.  (In fact, it was a fairly interesting flavor element.)
• AC Golden Brewing Goldenator Doppelbock (7.8%).  The brewery proudly talked about double decocting it, but this beer was a disaster.  It had no malt character--more American malts?--and punched under its weight.  But what really shocked me were the esters--tons of them.  In a blind tasting, there's no way I would have guessed it was supposed to be a lager.  Bocks work because, despite having lots of malt sweetness, they are lager-clean and ester-free. 
• Sandlot Nine Inch Ale (9.3%), a double IPA.  A strange bird that everyone was promoting.  Double IPAs are typically brewed thin so that the malt doesn't interfere with the hopping, especially tons of late-addition and dry-hopping.  This beer was the reverse; a heavy, sweet beer balanced by thumping bitterness and only a trace of aroma and hop flavor.  More like an old-school American barley wine, and pretty far out of step with where modern IPAs are heading.

In sum, none of these beers was a world-beater (though I thought the Fragrant Fire was noteworthy), and one was infected.  I have no doubt that the brewers could eventually dial in most of these beers if they worked on them (though barrel-aging, as Tenth Street demonstrated, is inherently uncontrollable).  But being well-trained professionals does not make it any easier to walk up to the plate and hit a home run, especially with weird styles you've never brewed before.  It takes a lot of time and effort to make exceptional beer.

Lesson 2: Big Breweries Don't Know Specialty Beer
Making production beer requires a brewer to put his attention on consistency.  When I visited the Budweiser brewery in St. Louis, I came to understand the overwhelming focus on this element of brewing.  It's a critical skill if you're making millions of barrels of mass market beer, but it doesn't serve you well when you start pulling out the boubon barrels and Sichuan peppercorns.  Specialty beer--the styles we associate with craft breweries--has intense flavors.  Craft breweries who regularly deal in 50 IBUs have developed a different focus: how to make intense flavors harmonize.  As weird as it sounds, I think that if MillerCoors wants to make really tasty specialty beers (double IPAs and spiced ales and barrel-aged stouts), they should probably send their brewers off to apprentice at craft breweries.  It's one thing to make very consistent light lagers; it's quite another to manage a barrel room.

Lesson 3: Big Breweries Need to Bone Up on World Styles
The problem with three of the six beers on offer were partly or wholly an issue of not understanding the style.  Doppelbocks need to be smooth and malty, but they also need to be alcoholic, have malt flavors and aromas, and be clean so as not to cloy.  Double IPAs are a meditation on hops.  Weissbiers should have billowing malts.  Failing to understand these qualities isn't important just because I'm a style Nazi.  It's important because there's a reason those beers are brewed the way they are--those qualities make the beers work.  If you understand them inside out, it's possible to start riffing and deviating from the standard profile.  But you gotta understand the basics, first.

Lesson 4: Big Breweries Are Not Poised to Compete at a Micro Level
Okay, I didn't get this from tasting the beers, but in talking to Addison and Lisa Zimmer.  I was surprised that these one-offs weren't more widely available.  When New Belgium or Dogfish Head do a specialty one-off, they send kegs around to key markets.  Why wasn't MillerCoors doing that with these beers? 

It's because MillerCoors has as much trouble scaling down as smaller breweries have scaling up.  They have national relationships.  They work with very large distribution chains.  They do publicity and advertising on a mass level.  Trying to figure out how to scale things down and put these beers in certain bars with small-bore whisper campaigns is alien to a company MillerCoors' size.  These small breweries are great for R&D, but they're not ready to compete head-to-head with Upright or even Russian River.

Final Thoughts
The blending of the markets--craft and mass--is beginning, but it will be a slow process.  There are always going to be customers for truly exceptional beer, and smaller breweries are in a better position to produce it.  Big breweries have a lot more resources to bring to brewing, but if they want to compete on quality alone, I don't think this is going to do them a lot of good.  I am slightly melancholy about the prospect of "commodity craft," but more and more, I'm convinced that in the sphere of exceptional beer, it will always be the little guys who dictate the terms of the conversation.  They live and breathe this stuff, and when you're making beer, that's what you've got to do to make it the best.

The Goose Island Challenge

One of the most interesting recent developments in beer was AB InBev's 2011 acquisition of Goose Island.  Until then, multinational beer companies had been trying to penetrate the craft segment with stealth labels like Shock Top and Blue Moon.  These beers were mainstreamed to appeal to the fat center of the American palate, and have long been drummed out of the "craft beer" fraternity for their middlebrow flavors and disreputable, hidden parentage.  For any number of reasons--the beer itself, the subterfuge, the stain of ownership--these beers could be distinguished from "real" craft beer.  (Full disclosure: I think Blue Moon is a respectable witbier and while it is certainly doesn't have the most character, I've had many worse examples by "craft breweries.")

When Bud bought Goose, though, it turned the arguments sideways.  Not only was Goose Island one of the more respected Midwestern craft breweries, but AB InBev invested heavily to allow the brewery to, for example, build the largest barrel-aging program in the US.  It appeared that, contra expectations, Goose Island was not going to build its reputation on a national campaign for 312 Wheat, but by competing head-to-head with the most lauded of the beer geek breweries.  The Shock Top arguments wouldn't work against Goose Island, so the only thing left was wondering whether St. Louis would be exerting subtle efforts to dumb down the beers (a charge I have heard many times since 2011).

A couple months ago, Goose Island sent me four of their barrel-aged beers (Halia, Juliet, Gillian, and Lolita), and it was with this critique in mind that I sipped them.  They run a similar continuum, all brett-aged in wine barrels with fruit additions, brewed in a range from 7.5% to 9.5%.  The brewery packages them in heavy, capped champagne bottles.  It's an extension of the Belgian line that began with Sofie and now runs to ten beers.  Most of them are barrel aged with wild yeast.  So: 1) are they good, and 2) are they dumbed-down?

Let's take the second question first.  It's not inconceivable that a large brewery would try to tempt the beer geek with a boozy specialty beer--Blue Moon has already done it.  They have a Vintage Ale Collection that is a pretty close analogue to the Goose Island range--Belgiany, strong, aimed at the upscale market.  The beer geeks give it a "meh," and not because it's Blue Moon.  These are beers aimed squarely at the Blue Moon drinker--not the Consecration market.  Beers like Proximity are gentle, made with nothing wild, and light-bodied--easy-drinking big beers. 

Goose Island's beers are nothing of the sort.  They are big and aggressive.  Of the four, three had enough brettanomyces to wake the dead.  The fourth, Lolita, was plenty tart, but had quite a bit of bright raspberry flavor and residual sweetness.  They are perfectly typical of what I don't like about American wild ales (except Lolita, which I enjoyed).  Wild ales have followed hoppy ales into the realm of punishing.  Rather than use wild yeasts to accentuate fruity flavors and add a bit of tartness, breweries like to amp up the acid and dryness to lacerating levels.  Part of this is the way wild yeasts behave in oxygen-porous wine barrels, but part of it is the American preference for volumes that go to eleven.  In a fist fight, Juliet could beat the hell out of most challengers.  The beer geeks agree, awarding these high scores on BeerAdvocate: Halia, Lolita, and Gillian 92/100 and Juliet 94.

The first question is a lot harder.  There was a moment when I was sitting in Drie Fonteinen in 2011 sipping an Oude Geuze (the one at right, in fact) when I had an epiphany.  I had been in Brussels for 24 hours and I'd sampled gueuzes (objectively the finest style on earth) from four breweries.  It wasn't that they were new to me, but the force of having them all in such a such a short period: I realized that while they had very strong flavors--each different--they were harmonious.  There was nothing searing about them.  The brett in these beers was balanced by the complex esters and acids developed over years of barrel aging.  Harmony and balance, far more than intensity, is what I value.

But that's not what the American beer geek values.  Intensity is a marker of authenticity in the US.  Intensity is a sensory marker for the ("off-center") irreverence only small, independent breweries can muster.  What fascinates and delights me is that Goose Island has decided to take this marker as a north star.  An arm of Anheuser-Busch Inbev is seeking to out-irreverent the little guys, at least in the glass.  In business, and especially in the self-congratulatory Silicon Valley, "disruptive technologies" are those which are designed to topple the market dominance of an established, outdated tech.  One story some craft brewers tell is that they are insouciantly  "disrupting" the old norms of the beer world.  Their maverick ways--you know, like selling hoppy IPAs--will radically change the beer world forever. 

But the truth is that the most disruptive brewery in America right now is Goose Island. 

Note: post edited lightly for clarity.  I don't know why I don't do that before I hit "post."

"We Are Craft Brewers"

The Brewers Association announced this morning that it was adding grodziskie and adambier to the ever-expanding list of official styles.  (More on that soon.)  I happened to be looking through my notes on an interview with New Belgium's Peter Bouckaert this morning, too, and I found a nice resonance between a comment he made and that news.

Credit: Brewpot

Obscure styles may have some commercial prospects, but probably not.  Yet brewers make them anyway.  When I spoke to Bouckaert, I asked him why New Belgium spends so much money on the foeder program, a project that--in an era when another brewery may be plausibly watering down their light lagers--can't be a huge profit center.  Here's what he said.

“One of the meanings of ‘La Folie’ is that it’s a business endeavor you’re sure to lose money on so we thought that was a great name for it. Why would you overly dry-hop a beer? Why would you do something stupid like that? Why would you make something that is the highest alcohol beer? We are craft brewers. That’s what we do. We are creating different flavors; we are reviving older beers that used to exist and faded away. Maybe there were financial reasons they faded away and that’s a good reason for us not to do it.”

The phrase "craft brewery" has become nearly meaningless in modern usage, but I would agree with Peter that projects like New Belgium's qualify as actual "craft."  That's why you'd brew an adambier or grodziskie, too.

Brewery Categories Defined

I was typing a detailed comment to Alan's recent thought-provoker and thought, damn, why I am burnishing his blog with all this great content?  That's the kind of generous guy I am.  Alan was discussing definitions of different categories of breweries and came up with this list: nano, micro, craft, crafty, and macro.  I think those are a good way to describe the way North Americans think about beer (possibly with the substitution of "brewpub" for "micro"), but my travels around the globe the last two years have completely scrambled the way I think about beer.  Here's the list I have taken to using, one that I think is more universal in its application:

• Brewpub/hausbrauerei: a proper pub that brews its own beer.  

• Production brewery: a brewery that packages its beer for sale largely off-premise.  May have a tasting room, but this doesn't make it a brewpub. 

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

• 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.  

• Independent brewery: Owned singly by one human or a family.  Nothing to do with beer quality.  

• 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. 

• Large brewery: Any brewery with an annual capacity of 300,000 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 thousands of breweries worldwide, only a small percentage of them make even as much as 100,000 barrels.  And a 300,000-barrel brewery is necessarily a pretty damn big facility.

Dubuisson: a traditional, independent production brewery.

Where I think North Americans get off into the weeds is trying to deal with the ownership structure, size, and configuration of a brewery and somehow try to correlate this with beer quality.  That notion is a uniquely new-(beer)-world view.  It sorta kinda makes sense because by 1980 the US had one category of brewery (industrial), and the beer Americans made ran the spectrum from yellow fizzy to slightly lighter yellow fizzy, from uninteresting to poor.  So anything that came after was "craft."  

That's a culturally-specific definition.  It doesn't work in the places we actually associate with beer, like UK, Germany, Belgium, or the Czech Republic.  If you want to make the tentative argument that large, industrial breweries generally make less interesting beer, I think you're on pretty firm ground.  But once you start talking about traditional, nano, independent breweries and brewpubs and tie these to beer quality, you lose credibility.  Some industrial breweries make superb beer, while lots of traditional breweries make pond water.  Many families use their old breweries as ATMs and ignore quality and I know you've wandered into a brewpub somewhere and been handed a biology experiment that someone mistook for beer. 

Finally: the word "craft" is also culturally-specific and therefore useless.  It means different things in different countries.  In the US, people take it to mean breweries established within the last 30-odd years that are relatively smaller than older macro breweries.  There is a strong (and mistaken) presumption of quality.  In Britain, "craft" means something entirely different.  That could be said about Germany and Belgium as well.  There's really no use for the term and I am going on a personal campaign to eliminate it from my own vocabulary. 

None of this is, I suppose, particularly critical.  But over the coming years as "craft beer" loses its meaning here, we'll be looking for a shared vocabulary, and I think you could do a lot worse than this.  Your thougths?

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.

Craft Versus Crafty: The Brewers Association Misstep

 Note: Post has updates (and more updates, and more...)

Can you tell if this is a craft brewery?

Yesterday the Brewers Association sent out a press release that rehashed a point they've made many times in the past: big brewers are peddling faux craft and this just isn't fair.  I have no idea what provoked the latest sortie, but this time the complaint has a really tone-deaf quality.  Craft beer already inspires cultish tendencies, and BA plays on that in spades here--right down to some creepy doublespeak.  You can follow the first link to read the whole thing, but I want to cherry pick a few sentences: 

• "An American craft brewer is defined as small and independent."
• "Witnessing both the tremendous success and growth of craft brewers and the fact that many beer lovers are turning away from mass-produced light lagers, the large brewers have been seeking entry into the craft beer marketplace."
• "[I]t’s important to remember that if a large brewer has a controlling share of a smaller producing brewery, the brewer is, by definition, not craft."
• The large, multinational brewers appear to be deliberately attempting to blur the lines between their crafty, craft-like beers and true craft beers from today’s small and independent brewers.

The Brewers Association has for decades been attempting to create the mental category of "craft beer."  They branded themselves that way and have been aggressive in promoting their definition.  But now here they use the passive construction to assert a bland truth about how a craft brewer "is defined," as if this comes a priori from the universe.  You invented "craft brewer," BA, so please own it.

Next they invent another new fiction, the "craft beer marketplace."  There is no such thing.  Large breweries do not have to "seek entry" into this fictive universe.  They sell beer, right there at the tap handle next to the imported Corona and the local micros.  They do not have to trawl the finer precincts where pubs bar the door to their kegs.  Finally, BA makes the unironic assertion that the big breweries are blurring lines.  Really?  Because it looks to me like these lines are pure inventions of the Brewers Association.

The response to this dictat was, even among the hardcore geek community, mixed.  There were articles, sharp blog posts, and lots of social media debate. Perhaps you even participated in it.

Here's what disturbs me.  The two parties involved in this debate are trying to sell me beer.   The BA has crafted a very strong, emotional brand and has attempted to hijack language ("craft brewery") as a way of enforcing it. As I think anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a huge fan of small brewers and a big critic of many of the practices of multinational beer companies.  But I reserve the right to make decisions about how I think about beer.  I get to call Goose Island and Widmer craft brewers if I wish. I decide whether a company makes good beer, and I get to ignore who the owner is. The Brewers Association may attempt to define categories of beer to benefit its members, but we don't have to accept it as fact.

Should consumers be aware that macros are setting up side brands to sell beer to a different target audience than their regular customers?  Yes.  Should the Brewers Association get to set the rules about what good beer is, who gets to make it, and what we should think about it?  That kind of answers itself, doesn't it?  All beer geeks want variety in the marketplace, competitiveness, and exceptional beer.  The Brewers Association is a powerful player in making sure that happens.  But we, as consumers, not the BA, have the final say over what good beer is, what craft beer is, and which breweries get to be called "craft."

___________________

Update: More commentary from around the beerosphere: brilliant post from across the pond; another skeptic; a faux craft brewer responds, appears real enough; and yet another skeptic.

Update 2: The plot thickens, as August Schell gets in on the action.  This is a must-read, and echoes a point I made three years ago.  Eric Steen posts some good thoughts, too.

Update 3:  And the debate continues.  Chris Staten at Draft Magazine, gets nuancey.  Sanjay takes the Brewers Association to task, but Ashley mounts a spirited defense.  Brian Leppla considers the "craft" question, and Stan, who says he has nothing new to add, decides to add something anyway.  The Motley Fool thinks about it in terms beer geeks don't.

To wrap things up, I'll point you to a very nice piece by Eric Gorski in the Denver Post that, more than anything I've read, lays out all the points in the debate.  Several days after the fact, I think it's pretty obvious that as a matter of messaging, last week's press release was a misfire by the Brewers Association.  It was designed to persuade, and it backfired even among many of its most ardent supporters.  I don't think anyone is averse to promoting (or even requiring) clear labeling information about where beer was brewed and by whom.  The mistake was way the message was delivered--surely a misdemeanor, not a felony--and something I hope they address in future communication.

Don't Call It "Good" Beer, Either

I know the horse is well and truly dead, but I have a few more licks to get in. The subject is this amorphous category we sometimes call "craft" beer even though it's an inadequate and misleading term. What we really care about is "good," but as Tim Webb writes in the September print edition of BeerAdvocate (perhaps the best mag available), this is no improvement:

"The problem is the British fixation, enshrined in CAMRA's policy, on the notion that for a beer to be 'good,' it must contain live yeast."

He adds Reinheitsgebot and the Brewers Association's definition of craft brewery as other definitions of "good." Indeed, we have some fairly well established, idiosyncratic definitions of what it means to be good, don't we? To Webb's three I've add a few more:

• Small, independent (Brewers Association)
• Hoppy, strong (American beer geeks)
• Alive and naturally carbonated (CAMRA)
• Made with traditional ingredients (Reinheitsgebot)
• Perfectly consistent and fresh (macros)
• Cold and "refreshing" (macro drinkers)
  
• Popular (all breweries)
  

Nowhere to be found in this list is a satisfying definition (never mind a universal one) of what good beer is. Webb concludes his article with the obvious: "The closer you come to defining good beer by a technical specification, the further away you move from being able to appreciate it."

Yup.

Entering the Post-Craft World

Yesterday I offered you reviews of four beers and asked if they were "craft" or not. Many of you instantly smelled a rat--and rightly so. That was the point. I hadn't exactly worked out the wording of this post to explain it, but no matter. Vasili Gletsos, the peripatetic brewer now manning the kettle at Laurelwood, did my work for me:

To me, the term is most useful as a historical movement to describe the revolution (resurgence?) of smaller breweries in a post-prohibition environment. We are now in a post-craft environment in which there is a wide variety of business models and ownerships in addition to a great depth of beer styles and experimentation.

In the middle part of the last century, technology and business conspired to rob the United States not only of nearly every beer style, but most of its local breweries. They were replaced by faceless behemoths that churned out beer in quantities inconceivable to the human mind. This had the virtue of dropping prices to almost nothing as efficiencies of scale and advertising budgets equal to the GDP of Paraguay doomed regional breweries. I could go on for a few more sentences here, but you know this story well already.

The corrective came in the form of a band of pirates who were interested in wrecking the machine of industrial brewing and creating space for the return of small-batch, artisanal brewing. To the extent there was a revolutionary impulse, it was that these businesses would compete on the bases of quality and flavor, not price. So began a correction that has, three decades on, radically altered the beer industry.

Unfortunately, there was a conceptual fault to this development, one located in the phrase "craft brewing." It led innocently to an idea that there was something called "craft beer." But beer is beer. It's either made with the highest quality ingredients and processes or it's not. It's either a brilliant interpretation of style or it's not. The matter of who owns the brewery is a strange abstraction.

The beers I reviewed yesterday came from Goose Island, a brewery wholly owned by Anheuser-Busch, which is itself owned by an international brewing conglomerate--one that makes those quaint American macros of the 70s look like pikers. The beers were, in order, (1) Mae (unreleased), (2) Juliet, (3) an unreleased stout, and (4) Madame Rose. As I was thinking about the review, I groaned with the expectation that someone would slag the brewery for selling out or dumbing down or whatever. (Even before the A-B purchase, certain craft nazis avid beer geeks held the brewery in great suspicion because it had the indecency to sell a huge amount of light wheat ale.) So I thought: why not head them off at the pass?

Vasili's right: we've entered a post craft world where even the meaning of craft brewery is fraying--never mind the idea of "craft beer." We're sort of stuck with the nomenclature of "craft" because it helps differentiate segments of the market--even while, admittedly, it introduces its own confusion. My recent posts about the craft brewing segment are a case in point. Still, as educated beer drinkers, we can avoid being fooled ourselves. We can admire and wish to support small, local breweries (and I do, hugely, on both counts); we can criticize breweries that make dumbed-down beer filled with cost-saving adjuncts to appeal to a mass audience. But at the end of the day, beer is beer, and we're going to have to get comfortable judging what's in the glass separately from who made it.

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Also: Alan has thoughts on the subject.

Is This Craft Beer?

Several weeks back, a brewery sent me samples of four beers. As usual, I have been slow to work my way through them and get to a review, but here we are. In a twist, though, I'm going to review them without naming the beers or the brewery. Why? Because we've lately been trying to define craft beer, and I'm wondering if you can do it without certain pieces of information concerning the ownership structure. In other words, does the craft live in the beer or the owner? (I should mention that two of these beers are experimental and have received no commercial release, so don't let that fool you.)

Note: Now that we've run the experiment, I'll include the names of the beers below for posterity. The brewery is Goose Island, now owned by In-Bev. Which doesn't really answer the question, does it?

Beer 1, Sour Peach Saison (Mae, unreleased)
This beer started life as a saison, though I found no evidence in the archaeological record. Because, to the base saison were added peaches and brettanomcyes--and those elements manhandled the beer and squashed whatever character might have come from previous yeasts. The peach flavor is light and delicate, but the beer is pretty sharply sour. The result is a beer that's less in balance than detente, with the acetic sour notes battling the sweet peachiness. Ultimately, the sour wins. Sour heads will love it, but regular beer drinkers might find it crosses the line.

Beer 2, Sour Fruit Beer (Juliet)
The second beer is an American sour, brewed to no traditional style. It is built on an idiosyncratic recipe that incorporates rye and Munich malt into what might be an otherwise familiar blond ale. The rye is useful in adding depth to the palate--and I also wonder how it stands up to the brettanomyces, which are added to the Cabernet barrels the beer is aged in. (Hypothesis: rye may offer studier snacking for the wild yeasts.) Beer 2 is finished with blackberries in the barrels. The beer is punch-colored and perfectly bright, with a head of uniform bubbles--akin to cider that form and dissipate. The aroma is a mixture of tart, wild yeasts and an earthy berry note. The flavor evolves from a straight, berry-infused lactic taste to something with a touch of acetic, and then a long, dry brett finish. It's a dusty, not funky, tart. The berries provide flavor and, as the beer warms, gentle sweetness. Balance is impressive between fruit and funk, and the brett at the perfect stage of dryness. An accomplished, tart, and lovely sour.

Beer 3, Imperial Stout Aged With, errr... (unreleased stout)
Blogger error. I took notes on this beer somewhere, but they're lost to me now. It was a barrel-aged beer that was aged with my mind wants to say vanilla bean. Or something. What I do recall is that was too much sweetness for my palate.

Beer 4, Sour Ale With Cherries (Madame Rose)
The brewery suggests by calling this a "Belgian style brown" an oud bruin, but I think this is misleading. It's a darkish sour beer, but it's not really brewed to style. That's fine, because it was an exceptional beer on its own merit. Rather than brown, it's a very deep amber/bronze with red highlights (the brewery calls it crimson, but that stretches things a bit). It has a lush cherry nose inflected by just a bit of sour, musty brettanomcyes. Made properly, sour beers pull a lot of flavor and aroma from fruit, almost like the captured, distilled essence, without becoming sweet. Beer 4 manages that perfectly. Balance is added by a milder acidity--bretty, but not aggressive--and some tannins. There's a bit of the soft maltiness remaining as well. (Suggestive that it's best not to age this beer.) The brett provides depth and dryness, but it's not a challenging beer. It is complex and approachable, with malt, fruit, and tartness balanced in an effervescent, lush beer. My favorite of the bunch.

All right, you got it figured out?

Update. I should have mentioned that I planned to reveal the brewery tomorrow--with, of course, some commentary.

Medium-Shallow Thoughts on Sierra Nevada, Plus Even Shallower Thoughts on Other Matters

I don't like to pick on commenters, for I get most of my pleasure in writing this blog by chatting with people in comments. But something Shawn said stuck in my craw:

Sierra Nevada and Sam Adams really aren't 'craft beer', though. By the legal definition they are, but not by any honest, realistic definition. Of course the 'most popular' are going to be the most widely distributed.

The definition of "craft" beer is one of no little controversy, but can we agree that there's no definition that eliminates Sierra Nevada, makers of some of the finest beer on this or any other planet? Everything about Sierra Nevada bespeaks quality, from their processes to ingredients to recipes to quality control.

Okay, I guess there's one way to critique the brewery: size. Ken Grossman does not stand over a three-barrel mash tun with a wooden canoe paddle. His beer is brewed in industrial-sized tanks with the help of lots of technology. Some people feel that you can't craft a hundred-barrel batch of beer (or whatever Sierra Nevada's is); somehow, the volume prohibits it. The Brewers Association made a similar connection when it declared that craft breweries had to be small and independent, until the independent breweries grew--and now you don't have to be small anymore.

The problem with this of course, is that it means that every small brewery is a craft brewery, no matter if they turn out delicious beer or pond water. (And everyone who loves good beer has had the pond-water experience at some little brewery or another.) Brewery size and beer quality are not correlated. Good beer is good beer, no matter which system it's brewed on or who owns it.

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I commend you to this hilarious, exquisite post from Alan, wherein he writes, among other things:

On the nose, there are notes of petroleum jelly and brown crayon. In my mouth, it is not the beer of yesteryear but a reasonably moderately soft slightly rummy middle with acrid burnt toast finishing beer. Bitter like a bit of white grapefruit set alight by a bit of damp cocoa pod coaxed into flame by a bit of gasoline. There it is - that tang of the plastic and cat sick on the carpet taste that I recall but, to be fair, it is very neatly tucked into a corner. Hardly notice it at all.

You'll have to click through to discover which beer he's writing about.

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More beer-and-Obama news.

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A titanic rant against Budweiser. (A huge amount of wrongness contained therein, but the misinformation and bias sort of adds to the fun.)

Small ≠ Craft

Charlie Papazian has long been a champion of small craft breweries. He's made it his life's work to popularize homebrewing and create a market for flavorful, hand-crafted commercial beer. If you were to identify a half-dozen people most responsible for the revival of good beer in the US, Charlie would definitely make the list. If you sense these accolades are a wind-up to a big "but," you're right.

But: the one area where I think Charlie has made a mistake is equating craft beer with small breweries. There are historical and conceptual reasons for this, but both are outdated and increasingly unworkable in a maturing, healthy brewing market. The historical reason, of course, has to do with the consolidation that left the US with around 80 breweries by the early 1980s and helped spark craft brewing. For the pioneers, there was something revolutionary about making quality beer out of wholesome ingredients, and only small breweries were doing it. Conceptually, the idea of hand-crafted beer contrasted sharply with the image of industrial plants pumping out oceans of beer.

Early on, only small breweries made rich, flavorful beer out of natural ingredients. The difference between craft beer and industrial beer was obvious. Problem is, things changed. Now very large breweries make craft beer. Budweiser's American Ale is chemically indistinguishable from ales made by 500-barrel breweries. Some small breweries are owned by big companies (that is, they're not independent), but make exceptional beer. And some small breweries make beer that is chemically indistinguishable from Pabst. Lines have blurred.

Charlie recently conducted a poll to find out whether people agreed with the notion that craft beer is something necessarily produced by small, independent breweries. Despite putting a finger on the poll (he included definitions for "small" and "independent" at the start of the poll) over half

"felt that craft beer could be made by a large brewery or a (small) brewery controlled or fully owned by a large brewery. In other words it didn’t matter whether a brewery was independent of a large brewing company."

That's good news. Good beer has nothing to do with the size of brewery that produced it, despite a strong early correlation. Apparently beer drinkers feel the same way.

When small breweries were just getting started, they had no infrastructure, no resources, and no political juice. When Charlie brought professional organizations on-line, it was instrumental in making the structural changes that allowed small breweries to emerge. Again, critically important. Small breweries still need an organization that gives their collective voice political clout. But that's a political matter. "Craft beer" is a product, distinct from the producer. Hair of the Dog can make it and Budweiser can make it. It would be cool if small, independent breweries all made great beer and large corporations only made sell-out, Vortex-bottled silly beer, but they don't.

Cheaper Cheap Beer Roughing Up Cheap Beer

"Brand loyalty" is all well and good ... until the cost of supporting your cheap brand runs into the realities of a collapsing economy. Then it's off to the next, cheaper cheap beer:

Heineken sales sank 18% from the previous year in grocery, convenience and drug stores during the two-week period ended July 5, followed by Budweiser at 14%. Corona Extra sales dropped 11%, while Miller Lite declined 9% and Bud Light fell 7%. Coors Light sales held up better, falling less than 1% from a year ago.

Meanwhile, sales of “subpremium” beers including Busch, Natural Light and Keystone posted “substantial gains”, according to Ad Age, which didn’t provide the specifics.

Ad Age adds (amusingly):

But while the economy is clearly dragging on the biggest beer brands, the severity of the declines also raises questions about the effectiveness of some of the category's biggest ad budgets. The decline at Bud Light comes as the brand is nine months into its "Drinkability" effort, designed to give the beer a more product-attribute-fueled push than its former frat-humor efforts did.

Miller Lite has tried to pound its "Great Taste" to sales gains in the same manner its new stable mate Coors Light succeeded with a single-minded focus on "Rocky Mountain cold refreshment." But that effort, too, has yet to gain traction.

Gee, I wonder why those ad campaigns have failed to sway drinkers. It couldn't be because, you know, since all tin-can beer tastes the same, customers are buying the cheapest stuff. Nah, couldn't be that.

The Difficulty Defining "Craft Brewery"

In case you missed this comment from my "I am a craft brewer" post, have a look. It highlights the trouble the Brewers Association has in trying to nail down which breweries qualify as "craft." A lovely and passionate defense of independent regional breweries:

"I was a craft brewer." That's the movie I want to make. Because, I was at one time, according to the BA and the video. But alas, I work for August Schell now, and we are not craft brewers (just ask the BA). Never mind the fact that we will celebrate our 150th year in 2010 as the second-oldest family owned brewery in the US. We survived prohibition, a Native American uprising that burned New Ulm to the ground, and the vanishing of regional breweries in the 70's and 80's. Forget the fact that we sold a tree on our grounds in the 80's to pay the bills. Discount that we brewed a German Pilsner and Weizen in 1986.

Because, the fact is, the bulk of our production uses corn as an adjunct. And even if you discount that beer, we would still produce a larger volume of non-adjunct beers than most of the top craft breweries. But hey, what does that matter?

No, I am not a craft brewer, and I'll happily be that for another 150 years.

Cheers!

David Berg
August Schell Brewing

I have written about this issue when A-B released American Ale (both here and here) and when the BA dumped Widmer/Redhook. This is definitely going to be an issue--and soon.

What is Craft Beer?

In the Bud thread below, Alison asks, "I am curious as to how you define "craft beer?" As I was writing that Bud post, I wondered briefly if I should define my terms, since I was clearly using a variant definition. There's an official designation* by the Brewers Association that craft breweries are "small, independent, and traditional." In general use, that's probably close enough.

But it that definition only describes the brewery, not the beer. The Brewer's Association is a guild of craft breweries, and they're more concerned about their membership than a subjective description of beer. I think we can make a distinction between craft-brewed beer that is concerned only with the beer, not who brews it, and that was the definition I was using in the Bud post.

My working definition of craft beer hews to a "functionalist" model of the definition of art. Monroe Beardsley offers this: "An arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character." Craft beer is that brewed with an intention toward its "aesthetic character." It is distinguished from macro beers, which are wholly commercial products where all the intention is toward the saleability and marketability of the beer. It's not the kind of definition that corresponds to metrics against which to judge beer, but I think it's a more honest guide because it gets at the nature of the beer in the glass rather than the brewer.

On the far edges, Adam--to take a recent example--and PBR are obvious. It's impossible to regard Adam as anything but a serious foray into aesthetic experimentation; it's equally impossible to regard PBR as anything but a commercial product. But I think it also clarifies things at the center more, too. Someone mentioned Blue Moon earlier. Leave aside who brews it--is it a beer that could credibly be judged against other white ales? It is. To me, that qualifies it as a craft beer. What about Fat Tire (to use my bête noire)? I find it so substandard, and so perniciously commercial, that I have a hard time thinking of it as craft beer. To me, it's the economic engine that allows New Belgium to brew the more interesting, niche beers in its lineup.

So for me, Bud American Ale is a craft beer. The only thing that could eliminate it from consideration is its brewer. Bud clearly went to the same effort to brew it as Oregon's breweries do when they make their craft beer. Bud's intention was to make a beer of aesthetic character. Does it matter that they've brewed it because they believe there's money in well-made craft beers? No. How could it--every brewery wants to sell their beer. Bud just happens to exceed the 2-million-barrel size limit.

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*That is, they produce less than 2 million barrels a year, control more than 75% of the company, and brews all malt beers or "beers which use adjuncts to enhance rather than lighten flavor."

Bud American Ale: the Triumph or Demise of Craft Beer?

I finally got my hands on Bud's American Ale, which seems simultaneously to be: 1) over-compensation for a company that's no longer American, 2) an acknowledgement that new products, not just new ads, are the only way to grow in the US market, and 3) a legitimate beer.

Let's start with the third point first. This is a real craft beer, not just a marketing gimmick. Bud has made a beautiful amber ale with a nice caramel malt note and a lightly citrusy hopping. They have dry-hopped it with Cascade hops (whole hops, apparently). I wouldn't call it a transcendent beer, but if you did a blind taste-test with this beer and several other craft ambers, I suspect it would finish in the middle of the pack. It is, for example, Fat Tire's superior--by quite a margin. I'm not a huge fan of ambers, but if I went to a party and this was in the fridge along with Corona, Widmer Hef, and Fat Tire, I'd be happy to grab the Bud Ale. And I'd enjoy it, too.

It's not surprising that Bud has made a good beer. I don't doubt that if Bud wished, its brewers could instantly produce a dozen excellent beers, and probably a world-class lager or six. The best, most well-trained brewers in the world work for Bud. They don't brew world-class beers because they don't wish to, not because they can't.

Three questions spring to mind: why a craft beer, why an amber, and what does it spell doom for craft breweries?

The answer to the first question seems obvious. While the macro market is flat or in decline, the micro market continues to grow and grow. The US beer market continues to grow slowly, but all the growth is in the craft segment. Bud can continue to buy up smaller breweries piecemeal to get a part of that growth, or take the plunge with their own brand and try to bring the market under the Bud name.

Okay, so why an amber? No doubt there's an easy, flip answer--the focus groups liked it best. (And actually, I bet they did. I bet Bud tried a bunch of ales and came up with this one. I would have loved loved loved to have been among the focus groups so I could see what was in the mind of the giant.) But it also makes sense. If you want to build a market for ales, you want to actually brew an ale. The craft market has proven the enduring popularity of the style, particularly as an introductory beer for new ale drinkers. It's nothing like Bud. Amber ales are especially fruity and ale-y. They exhibit a sweetness totally unlike light lagers--and which totally beguiled an early generation of Oregonians. Add a little dry-hopped Cascade citrus, and you introduce drinkers to the flavor of hops without risking turning people off with bitterness. If you want to create a market by priming the palates of for ales, this is a great way to go.

All well and good, but does it spell doom for craft breweries? If Bud makes a great (and cheaper) amber, will people quit drinking Full Sail's? I would love to hear the beer-economist reflect on this question, but my sense is that it's just the opposite: Bud can reach 100 million consumers who will never otherwise consider a craft beer. And once they've begun drinking Bud's ale, they may well enjoy Black Butte Porter or BridgePort IPA or Roots Heather. If Bud's experiment is successful, they will expand the market for craft beer--one they won't ever be able to dominate in the way they dominate the single-product macro market.

I love that Bud has made a serious beer. It looks to me like a trojan horse that millions of Americans may unwittingly invite into their refrigerators. And once dry-hopped ales get in there, they may never leave.

Update. Maureen Ogle points out an obvious analogy (one I nevertheless missed) to the scenario above: the Starbucks phenomenon.