Sales of Craft Exceed Domestic Premium in the Pac NW

Last week, I began what will be a short series of posts on a presentation Dan Wandel made for SymphonyIRI that looked at sales figures and trends for craft beer sold at supermarkets (post 1, post 2). Today I'm going to highlight the last slide Dan showed us. It's a graph of two segments of the beer market, domestic premium and craft beer. It was a complex chart going back 2 1/2 years and split between Oregon and Washington. I've reproduced a detail of the slide showing the past year's sales in Oregon. Washington's looks roughly the same.


In April 2010, craft beer briefly outsold domestic premiums, then fell behind again. But in October, craft passed domestic premium again and hasn't looked back. It's worth adding a bit more context to fully understand these numbers. Keep in mind that Symphony/IRI only tracks supermarkets, not specialty retailers like Whole Foods and New Seasons--where craft beer massively outsells domestic premium. It also doesn't capture draft sales. In other words, the company tracks sales in the place most favorable to the domestic premiums like Bud and Coors.

The other thing to acknowledge is that the NW is way out in front of everyone. The point in preparing the slides is to illustrate craft beer's potential nationally based on their actual numbers here. We tend to think that craft beer will never supplant national light lagers, but these figures show they can.

One final point. In his presentation, Wandel sometimes included A-B's Shock Top and Coors' Blue Moon in the craft segment and sometimes he didn't. But no matter what segment you put them in, it's worth noting that they sell more than any single craft brand. (At the blogger's conference, I asked Blue Moon's Lisa Zimmer how many barrels that brand sold, and I think she said 1.7 million. That's about 10% the size of the entire craft market.)

Some people get freaked by the idea that the macros are co-opting craft beer, and to a certain extent, so am I. The silver lining, though, is that craft is now the tail that's wagging the dog. Macros see charts like the one in this post, and they see the writing on the wall: Americans are increasingly rejecting light lagers. People have been looking at SymphonyIRI's numbers on macros and seeing staggering five-year declines in domestic sales: Budweiser -30%, Miller Genuine Draft -51%, Old Milwaukee -52%, Michelob -72%. The trends are unmistakable: light lagers, though still the dominant player in beer, will continue an inexorable decline in the years ahead, replaced by more flavorful ales. Just look at what's happening in the Northwest.

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CHART: SYMPHONY/IRI

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.)

Deep Thoughts: Novelty Fatigue

Bill went to the Beermongers' second anniversary bash, rich with rare specialty beers, and was surprised at how low the attendance was. He posed an open question (with probes, like any good researcher should) about why that would be. With 24 hours of consideration under my belt, I have a hypothesis: we're suffering from novelty fatigue.

Used to be (like, five years ago) that specialty, one-off beers were rare birds. Most breweries hadn't started a barrel-aging program, and seasonal releases were good for variety, but they weren't particularly exotic beers. When a brewery did release something strange and special, beer geeks flocked to check it out. Beer fests accelerated the phenomenon by giving breweries an opportunity to highlight rarities and special beers. Breweries started developing barrel programs.

Fast forward to 2011. There has been an event like the one at Beermongers nearly every weekend of the spring and summer (sometimes more than one), and breweries are the font of dozens of one-off beers every month. The thing is, mostly these appeal to beer geeks. And, while there are lots of beer geeks, there aren't an infinite supply. We can only drink so many new beers. I know from my own habits that this is a process of selection. Devonshire White Ale, yes. Double gin-barrel aged wit, no. This fest, yes; that one, no. It's not that I'm not interested in all these beers and fests, it's that I can't enjoy them all. So I skip some--and in truth, most.

One other observation. While I do like one-off beers, I actually like beers that stay around even more. I like to get to know a beer over time, and I still mix up new beers with old standbys in my rotation. When I try new beers, there's something satisfying in knowing that it won't be the last time I get to drink it. One-offs have their place, but ephemera begs to be considered dispensable, and I succumb to that impulse.

Best-Selling American Craft Beers

Last week, I began what will be a short series of posts on a presentation Dan Wandel made for SymphonyIRI that looked at sales figures and trends for craft beer sold at supermarkets. In that post we looked at the best-selling styles; today we look at best-selling brands.

As with last week, I've reworked the data a bit to take out some of the best-selling SKUs tracked by SymphonyIRI: Sam Adams Seasonal (No. 3), Sam Adams Variety Pack (No. 5), Sierra Nevada Seasonal (No. 9) and New Belgium Seasonal (No. 12). (In the case of seasonals, several beers share the same SKU and are sold at different times of the year; variety packs, obviously, include more than one beer.) The remaining eleven account for 28.5% of all the beer tracked by SymphonyIRI--a sizable piece of the pie given that the company tracks 253 IPAs alone. In fact, the top four account for nearly 20% of all sales.

Here are the top ten, and the percentages indicate the total proportion of the entire craft segment that beer controls. The eleventh beer is Magic Hat's Number 9, at 1%.


When I looked at this list, my eye was attracted to Sierra Nevada's Torpedo--and then I realized something about this list. Only Torpedo is a recent brand. In fact, the next newest beer is Sam Adams Light, released a decade ago.

Sierra Nevada Pale (1980)
Sam Adams Boston Lager (1984)
New Belgium Fat Tire (1991)
Shiner Bock (1913)
Widmer Hefeweizen (1985)
Sierra Nevada Torpedo (2009, bottle)
Sam Adams Light (2001)
Redhook IPA (1995)
Kona Longboard Lager (1998)
Deschutes Mirror Pond (1992ish)

Clearly, it helps to have a jump on things. To see just how consistent these beers have been, have a look at Stan Hieronymus' report from four years back. And yet, despite this consistency, it's not like there's no movement. Not all these beers are headed in the same direction or at the same rate. (And no, I have no idea if these reflect year-to-year variation or are indicative of larger trends or volatility.)

Sierra Nevada Pale_______0.9%
Sam Adams Boston Lager___0.0%
New Belgium Fat Tire____-4.5%
Shiner Bock_____++++++__11.1%
Widmer Hefeweizen_______-9.5%
Sierra Nevada Torpedo___59.2%
Sam Adams Light________-15.1%
Redhook IPA______________4.5%
Kona Longboard Lager____45.5%
Deschutes Mirror Pond____3.5%

In some ways, it's easy to overthink these stats, though. Deschutes is the fifth largest craft brewery, but only cracks the list at number ten. What does this tell us? That Deschutes' production includes a pretty diverse line of beers that sell well. Is that good or bad? Probably neither, but interesting. By contrast, New Belgium has a huge tent pole beer in Fat Tire.

More to come.

Sage and the Nomenclature of "Spiced Beer"

Over the weekend, I finally got around to drinking some of the Deschutes-Boulevard White IPA.* It's a bit different from the version that was pouring when I tried it several weeks ago, and also different from the different version available in the Portland brewpub. But it is very closely related and shares the key ingredient they both featured: white sage.

Not all spices work well in beer; I would venture to say most don't. Herbs seem to do better (a subtle distinction but hang with me). Whenever a brewer adds an ingredient banned by Reinheitsgebot, she has to decide how much that flavor will compete with or complement the innate flavors in the beer. Spices are intensely-flavored and few have much in common with beer. I love cardamom, for example, but have never liked it in beer. Too sweet, too prominent. Cinnamon in small doses is quite nice--it's a bit woody and tannic and can accent other flavors. Maybe coriander's success demonstrates the point; over the centuries, all other spices have been abandoned.

Herbs, on the other hand, are more gentle, more subtle, and more like hops (itself an herb). Sage is a great example. In these white IPAs, it is a perfect bridge between a stiffer dose of hops and the sometimes aggressive notes of coriander. It's a perfect marriage, and I despair to think that these experiments may never be repeated. I could drink sage beer all day long.

Relatedly, as more an more breweries toss in the odd herb or spice to accent a beer--and many times, we're talking about very subtle accenting--we must contend with a very unwieldly and inelegant style designation: "spiced beer." Or less elegant: "herb or spiced beer." I would really love to come up with something less clunky and misleading ("spiced ale" calls to mind mulled wassail, not a lemongrass IPA). Anyone think of a better name? Something with a bit more poetry and accuracy? Anyone?

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*Alan McLeod posted an interesting rumination on the importance of history in beer appreciation, noting in comments "I want the direct immersive experience when I am tasting. I still think beer history is an excellent thing. But it takes away, for me, from the appreciation of the beer if I overlap one with the other." This beer is a good example of why I always want to know more, and why appreciation for me begins with a beer's story. The collaboration between the two breweries began just after Deschutes finished Hop in the Dark, their black IPA.** Larry Sidor and Steven Pauwels wondered, "what would a white IPA look like?" Then they wondered what contributions breweries from their regions of the country might make to fuse regional particularlities into the beer and they came up with Conflux #2/Collaboration #2. To me, the story made all the difference in understanding how you'd get to a beer like this.

**Not only are my footnotes threatening to gobble the post, but I've footnoted a footnote; perhaps the first such instance on a blog. Thank you very much. In any case, I acknowledge the manifold problems with the phrase "black IPA," but I used it in the previous footnote because it obviously leads into the story of white IPA in way CDA*** just wouldn't do.

***Kidding!

Beermongers' Second Anniversary

For those of you in or near Portland this weekend, you might consider a trip down to Beermongers, where there will be way more good beer than you can drink.

Second Anniversary Celebration
Sunday, September 11, 12-8PM
SE Division and 12th Avenuehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
$15 Admission = Souvenir Festival Glass + 7 tasting tickets
Additional Tickets $1 each
21+OVER
CASH ONLY!

Food Provided by: Curbside Grill and Nourishment

I'll add the extensive taplist in comments--Saturday's is now available. But as a teaser, it includes things like: Eel River 2008 Porter, Bend Scarlet Imp Red, Breakside Oude Noire, De Dolle Dulle Teve, and Burnside Bacon Stout. And those constitutes just 1/7th of the full list. For tomorrow. If you're looking to get your geek on, that's the place to be.

America's Best-Selling Craft Beer Styles

A couple of weeks back, Dan Wandel made a presentation about the craft beer sales tracked by his company, SymphonyIRI. They track scan data from supermarkets, big box retailers, and convenience stores across the country. The company doesn't track sales of every store--specialty retailers like Whole Foods and New Seasons, nor mom and pop stores. Nor does it track sales of draft beer, which constitutes a far larger proportion of the craft market than macro (mainly because of brewpubs). What SymphonyIRI does track are sales of packaged beer in the biggest part of the market, and so these numbers are useful in seeing where the larger trends are, separate from all the beer geek noise people like me tend to focus on.

I got to sit in on the presentation (a high-tech phone and Powerpoint presentation via conference call) and found it absolutely fascinating. There's a huge amount of the info that is too fine-grained to interest most folks, but a few data points really jumped off the page. I'll share these with you over the next few days (I just got a copy of the Powerpoint slides).

The first thing I want to look at is style preferences. Depending on how you slice them up, there are probably 30-40 different major styles of beer brewed commercially in the US. But the top three styles account for all craft sales, and the top five for two-thirds. America has a huge amount of variety in the market, but in terms of overall sales, we're really a five-style country.

I'm going to present the numbers a little differently than Dave did, so for those of you who've seen these figures, don't be alarmed. The first and fourth best-selling "styles" are actually seasonals (all the breweries seasonals throughout the year collapsed into one category) and variety 12-packs. Since they're not actually styles, I've pulled them out of the list and recalculated the percentages of the remaining eight styles. Here they are:


There are a couple of interesting addendums to the list. Beer geeks would probably expect to see IPAs leading the way, but this is actually the first time in SymphonyIRI's tracking that IPAs have edged out pales--a leader for years (maybe decades). This is significant because it is so far behind when this phenomenon reached the beer geek world. IPAs have been the most popular style for maybe a decade among the avid fans. This tells me that big trends within the avid base are worth watching as potential future features of national beer culture. As a related note, Wandel added this: in 2010, 177 IPAs were available in supermarkets. Now there are 253, a spike of 43% in one year. Wow.

More to come--

BrewDog's Ghost Deer--Too Strong to be True?

Somehow I missed the latest gonzo marketing blitz from the lads at BrewDog. (That may be a downside of always keeping the volume at 11.) In July, they announced another super-strong beer called Ghost Deer that came with all the unusual bells and whistles we associate with BrewDog:

Ghost Deer is a 28% fermented beer, the strongest ever fermented beer.... After fermentation it is aged for 6 months in some amazing whisky, bourbon, rum and sherry barrels. There is only one Ghost Deer head and this beer will only ever be available on draft, served in a stemmed glass, direct from the mouth of the deer himself.

That business about the deer is of course literal--it pours from the mouth of a taxidermied deer head. The release was accompanied by one of the brewery's famous videos, which tells the tale of the ghost deer and manages to advance the brand brilliantly.

All well and good. But here's the thing: 28%?? Can this be? If BrewDog has managed to ferment a beer to that level, it would be a towering achievement. They report using three yeast strains to get there, but I've never heard of any yeast that comes close to tolerating that level of alcohol (White Labs and Wyeast strains top out at 18%). Beer has complex sugars that yeasts have a hard time digesting at final gravity, so even if you found a yeast strain that could go that high, I don't see how it could munch through the maltotriose to get down to that level. It seems to me that if BrewDog managed to create a beer of 28% strength entirely from fermentation, it would represent a radical advancement--one far more impressive than taxidermied deer heads.

Any sciencey types out there willing to shed some light on this? Is BrewDog polishing the apple here, or is it really possible to tease 28% alcohol out of the hardest-working fungi in the beer world?

Any Theories?

Give it to Redhook--they're definitely willing to try unorthodox marketing techniques. Take for example the package I got yesterday. The brewery is entering expanding their line in the lucrative 22-ounce bottle market, and so they sent me a Pilsner, ESB, and IPA. That makes sense, but then what to make of this waist-high distressed-steel sign they also tucked in with no explanation. (Click to enlarge; those are the 22s in the picture, to give you a sense of the scale.)


Let's make a game of it. Aside from the obvious--but not quite persuasive--explanation that they sent it to me to get a blog post out of it (there's gotta be far cheaper ways to get press), why did they send it?

I will say this; it's pretty cool. I wouldn't have minded distressing it myself over the course of the next thirty years, but that's a small quibble. As brewery swag goes, it is the largest and most interesting piece I've ever received.

Black Market for Beer, or Good Old-Fashioned Arbitrage?

Note: post has been updated below.

I would very much like the Beeronomist to comment on this Washington Post article, but in the meantime, I'll do it myself. You are well aware of the issue: reselling "buzz" beer on the internet at an extravagant mark-up. Some breweries, apparently, are apoplectic:

Last month, for example, San Diego’s Stone Brewing Co., whose rare Vertical Epic beers are sometimes listed on eBay for more than $1,000 per bottle, began selling the first beer in its new Quingenti Millilitre series via a lottery system, and Stone has announced that people who try to resell it will be banned from future drawings. “We have involuntarily been a part of the eBay aftermarket for many years,” says Greg Koch, Stone’s co-founder and chief executive. “This is the first time we’ve come out, laid it on the table and said very point-blank, ‘Please, do not resell.’”

Daniel Fromson, who wrote the article, diligently follows the breweries' pique and ventures into the weeds of law and interstate commerce. The conclusion is a kind of moralistic/legalistic scolding of customers who are, in his words, "exploiting" the breweries.

Hogwash. In economics, there's this concept called "arbitrage," which is exemplified precisely in the act of buying underpriced specialty beer from the brewery and reselling it for fantastic sums online. (Here's Patrick using an example from the Portland Timbers.) Usually, people exploit loopholes for arbitrage opportunities. NPR recently reported that people were using a government incentive of free delivery to sell unwanted silver dollars; people were buying them in massive quantities with credit cards to get frequent-flier miles and then just spending the dollars or taking them to banks.

But here's what I don't get: why don't breweries just charge more for their beer? No one's exploiting a loophole; they're buying beer at prices way below their market value and reselling them instantly at their market value. Prices always find a point of equilibrium between supply and demand, and if breweries are going to leave all that money sitting on the table, people are going to capitalize on the chance to snatch it up.

There's a secondary thing I don't get. The article mentions a bunch of the classic beer geek celestials, like Russian River, Lost Abbey, and Cantillon. These breweries attained their status principally by offering beer so good it could command these prices. There's a clear halo effect when you are regarded as producing ambrosia that's very good for business. The whole purpose in creating rare specialty beers--from a business perspective--is to create buzz and bring attention to your product. It creates fanatics who will go online and buy your beer at $400 a pop--which in turn gets you more attention as the Washington Post writes about your beer.

If breweries were honestly losing money on the resales, that would be one thing, but they're not. They sell a product at a price they believe is reasonable and they make a tidy profit doing it. At any point, they could charge more for their beer if they wanted to do it and remove the incentive for people to resell online. For very good business reasons, they choose not to. For one, they keep their customers happy and engaged. For two, they continue to be among the very few breweries in the world that can command those prices on a bottle of beer--a pretty great marketing trick.


Update: Patrick picked up the baton and expanded on this in a more professional manner. It's a fine and careful consideration, and you should read it all, but of course, I'll poach a choice cut for my own purposes.

The fact that these market have arisen suggests that there was a missing market problem: buyers and sellers who would like to transact but for whom there is no forum for such transactions. The most common reason for such transactions is some sort of regulatory constraint. Black markets in command and control economies like the former Soviet Union are a perfect example: shoes are on sale in Moscow, but there is little demand, so buyers buy them and sell them illegally in Siberia and so forth.

You'll have to follow the link to see where he takes it.

Has the Pacific Northwest Lost Its Hop Monopoly?

Since I was out not laboring on Labor Day, I missed a potential story hook: the rise of hop farming outside the Pacific Northwest. Colorado, Wisconsin, and New York and New England--and probably elsewhere that I missed, too. These are small concerns and the industry--such as it is--is in the fragile incipient stages. Hop acreage in these states is miniscule by comparison to the Pacific Northwest. (Oregon has 4,600 acres under cultivation and Washington a booming 24,300; Colorado has 75 and Wisconsin and the Northeast similarly measure their acreages in the tens, not thousands.)

Still, these are real numbers. An acre of hop fields produces over 2,000 pounds of hops, so that wee Colorado planting is going to produce around 150,000 pounds of hops. That's not going to go far at Budweiser, but these growers aren't working with In-Bev, they're working with craft brewers:

Hamm said the association is a "loose group" of mostly part-time hop growers who are working toward establishing their own full-fledged operations to supply the state's craft brewers.

Those brewers, like Odell Brewing Co. in Fort Collins, would like to buy as much Colorado-grown hops as possible to support the fledgling industry.

Joe Mohrfeld, Odell's head brewer, said the brewing company has worked with Colorado State University's specialty crops department to obtain hops for its "Hand Picked Pale Ale" and other special seasonal beers.

I'd like to highlight three aspects of this development that strike me as very promising:

1. Localizing of beer. I have long longed for the return of more traditional modes of brewing, in which local ingredients went into local beer. Until rail, refrigeration, and industrialization (that is, for 98% of brewing history), beer was necessarily local. The beer tasted of the land in which it was produced. Because each agricultural region is unique, different strains will grow better in different places, and the beers will naturally adopt a local flavor.
   
2. Terroir. At some point Stan Hieronymus will complete his book on hops, and I'm hoping my understanding of terroir takes a quantum leap. What I do know is that the hops that grow well in Yakima aren't the same hops that grow well in the Willamette Valley, nor do identical strains produce identical-tasting hops when grown in these two regions. What do Wisconsin Cascades taste like? What about New York Willamettes (a bizarre thing to write). Will we see Sauk Goldings?
   
3. Local businesses. One doesn't want to overstate the wholesomeness of craft brewing on the jobs market. Given the choice, most people would probably rather clean kegs for Budweiser than a seven-barrel craft brewery: the salary and benefits will inevitably be better. But what craft brewing has done is fragment what had become an amazingly clean, streamlined process of producing beer. This gives thousands of entrepreneurs new ways to enter the market. Thanks to craft brewing, we have new distributors, new alehouses, new events coordinators to run all those fests, and now, new hop-growers. (Which includes, lest I fail to mention in, the burgeoning group of organic hop-growers.)
   

I'm not sure other regions of the country will ever constitute much of a commercial threat to the hop growers in Yakima and the Willamette Valley. (So the answer to my title is no.) But they can have a substantial impact on the way beer tastes and on the kinds of beers that are in the market. And in that we can happily rejoice.

Your Best Ambers and Reds

I haven't solicited you for your favorites lately, but a long holiday weekend seems like an ideal opportunity to get some opinions flying. The purpose behind these open threads is to find examples in a style I may not know about for possible inclusion in a book I'm working on. (Those of you outside the Northwest become precious resources.) I want to use beers that enjoy at least a regional distribution, mostly bottled examples, and those which are enduring standards and likely to still be sold by the time the book comes out (probably 2013).

American ambers and reds are often collapsed into a single style. Personally, I think this is a mistake. Fifteen years ago, reds were vanishingly rare and ambers were quite popular. The ambers of those days are the ones we still have around--mid-alcohol riffs on strong bitter with a balance point headed toward the malty, but with all that American hop goodness you expect from an American ale. Reds of the day were similar--except maybe they tilted more toward Munich instead of caramel malt. If you look at the top reds now, you see that they've strayed pretty far from the original mark. Now most are more similar to IPAs and double IPAs, though with a different malt base. Reds are less complex, with just a bit of candy sweetness to balance the assault of hops. (At the blogger conference, two of the beers that really impressed me were reds--Cigar City's cedary Tocobaga and Hopworks Imperial Red.)

Of course, you're invited to dispute this thesis, too. I'd be interested to hear your views, especially as they are backed up by examples--examples I can track down and maybe use for the book. The past editions of these open threads have been really valuable--for each style you've directed me to at least a couple beers that will go in the book. So consider this my advance thanks.

I'll be out of town and away from computers through Labor Day, so see you Tuesday--

Friday Flick: Firestone Walker's Burton Union System

Until three hundred years ago, brewing was a pretty small-bore enterprise. Much of it happened at the home level, and very little was what we could now call "commercial." The breweries of Burton upon Trent changed that when the region became the engine of English brewing in the 18th century. As they grew, brewers developed a process called the "union system" of brewing that involved a complex matrix of fermenting casks of ale. After a day of fermentation in a large vat, the beer was pumped into a series of connected casks, each fitted with a swan-neck rod that deposited expelled yeast into a capturing trough. The yeast and beer separated in the trough and the beer was returned to the casks. By 1890, every brewery in Burton used the system.

This was one point of innovation in a long line of automation, and by the 21st century the Burton union system was nearly extinct--only Marston's still uses it. Ah, but then things got a little brighter: Firestone Walker took up the art. It's a fascinating development, and this film captures it beautifully. Have a look:

From the Oregonian: Sad and Sadder

I was saddened to see that Paul Pintarich died yesterday. He was a longtime Oregonian journalist and editor, but perhaps his most enduring legacy will be History by the Glass, his 1996 history of Portland's old taverns (which was revised and re-issued in 2007). Our friend John Foyston had a connection to Paul (they worked together for a time, and Pintarich's fascination with old bars is in the heart of Foyston's wheelhouse), and he has a short piece at his blog you might like to see.

The second piece is a trivial matter, but a maddening one. Have a look at this photo:


See there where it says "Governor of Beervana"? That refers to the John Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado. Now, I'm never surprised to see misappropriations of the word "Beervana" in the popular national press. A lot of people don't realize that we seized the term for our own purposes in about 1995. But the paper this was taken from is the Oregonian. Absolutely shameful and unforgivable.

(As for the article, it is the usual hack work of a once-great writer. As a perfect example of Will's fall, he begins the piece with a misquote from Franklin. Later he claims America was "founded on beer." Again, wrong. Beer, that famous antiscorbutic from the 17th century, did indeed ride in the belly of the Mayflower. But the colonists couldn't make proper beer here and imported tons from the old country. North America was, by a wide margin, a far bigger market than either India (tiny) or the Baltics.

I wouldn't expect Will to know that arcana, but if he's going to flop out the "founded on beer" quote, we should expect him to have done a little research. For its first 200+ years, America was a rum and whiskey country. Daniel Okrent, for instance, in his fantastic account of Prohibition, Last Call, notes that by the time of the American revolution, there were 100 distilleries for every brewery in the country.

Hey look, three paragraphs and we're still in a parenthetical digression.)

The real crime lies with the Oregonian slug-writer, though--whom we must assume has arrived so recently in Oregon that s/he doesn't know where Beervana is.


Update: Bill Night weighs in, insightfully and amusingly. Must read. For more O craziness, have a look at the spat Patrick gets in with editor Peter Bhatia. It does not reflect well on the O.

Preparing the Mutt

A few shots from last night as Lucky Lab's "the Mutt" came together. Two things these photos don't show: (1) Oregon Governor Kitzhaber stopped by (randomly)--Bill Night apparently larned him up on the nature of fresh hops; and (2) there were a bunch of dogs running around (naturally), and one was wreathed in hops.

Anyway, enjoy.

In Which Steve Duin Praises JV Northwest

Steve Duin is a longtime political columnist for the Oregonian, and for some reason he went off script today to write about JV Northwest, a metal fabricator that made the switch from saw-blade manufacturers to brewery builders. The thrust of the story is one of those 'local company does good in a bad economy' pieces, but it's generally just a nice recap of one of the country's premier manufacturers of brewing equipment.

Microbrews continue to surge. As Jones said, "Once you're hooked on microbrew beers, no matter how bad the economy gets, you're not going back to Coors Light."

And JVNW continues to develop enough proprietary designs that Jones is sometimes forced to turn business away. When annual sales hit $25 million five years ago, the pace at the plant was a bit too intense, so JVNW scaled back to the $18 million range.

In this whirlpool of industrial noise, the whispers that Oregon is bad for business never break the surface.

Worth a look.

Devonshire White Ale; a Taste of the Past

Sometime nearly 500 years ago, a man named Andrew Boorde visited Cornwall and wrote about the local beer he found there: "Their ale ... looking white and thick, as if pigs has wrestled in it."* Sounds tempting, yes? What if I add that the beer was made with eggs, salt, and some flour thrown in after the mash? Irresistible. Ben Edmunds thought so; last week he served some--the first time in decades?--at Breakside.

Ben didn't make it exactly as the old accounts describe. (Thank god.) There are certain modernities professional brewers must observe. The flour and eggs, though, those he tossed in. The original Cornish ale was made in the manner of sourdough, with a pinch of the last batch kept in reserve for pitching into the next (it was known, poetically, as "the ripening"). It produced sour beer that needed to be drunk speedily lest it become an unhealthy science experiment. Ben achieved the tang with a bit of sour wort added into conditioning.

The resulting beer? Surprisingly tasty. It was thick, cloudy, and white--not foul enough to suggest the involvement of pigs, but certainly rustic-looking, like river water frothed by rapids. The pint I got came with a small skiff of beautiful foam, not wholly dissimilar to clotted--or Devonshire--cream. It didn't stick around long, though, and underneath was that whitish liquid. Amazingly, it was quite palatable. It was mildly tart and very thick, sort of like liquid sourdough bread. It was enjoyable enough that I had a second pint. And, should Ben ever get around to making another batch, I'd happily have a third and fourth pint to boot.

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*In the English of the day, it was actually rendered thus: "Their ale ... lokinge whyte and thycke, as pygges had wrastled in it.” More, much more, on the style here.

Things That Make Beervana Beervana: #9, Lucky Lab The Mutt

There are a number of elements that give Beervana it's particular flavor, and a somewhat unemphasized one is the sense of community and collaboration. This happens at the brewery level, where brewers share information and tips about recipes and methods (when I was at Breakside a while back, Ben was looking over notes he'd received from Ben Dobler and Alex Ganum on their goses--just one example). But it also connects beer drinkers directly with breweries through collaborative projects and events. In Portland, the line between brewer and drinker is murky.

The Lucky Lab's annual "The Mutt" fresh-hop ale is the quintessential metaphor for this sense of community and collaboration. The brewery picks their own hops and solicits donations from gardeners around the Rose City. Beginning at five, volunteers wade into the pile of bines and began shucking. When they're done, the baskets go into a beer called "The Mutt"--for the hoppy parentage of the beer is always a vast, mutable tapestry of hop strains.

If you have extra hops, drop them off any time tomorrow (last year they had 170 lbs of hops and this year they're shooting for 200). And if you want to help harvest--the zymurgical equivalent of a community barn-raising--be there at 5:30 pm to start plucking. It's happening at the patio of the Hawthorne Lab (915 SE Hawthorne), and I can absolutely guarantee a good time.

Hop Harvest for "The Mutt"
August 30, 5:30 pm
Lucky Labrador Brewpub, 915 SE Hawthorne
Bring your bines!

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PHOTO: BEN FLERCHINGER BY ANGELO DE IESO

America the Best, Ctd.

On Thursday, I wrote a post arguing that the US has the world's best beer ("hands down"). It was a post in which I tried to bring together two threads: the lighthearted case made by Chris Bertram against the US, and the arrival of Breakside's Devon White Ale--perhaps the first time that style has been brewed in over a hundred years (or, of course, perhaps not). In the process, I offended people like the estimable Canadian Stephen Beaumont and Czech-residing Argentine Pivní Filosof--which was not the goal.

I have argued many times against bests on this blog. They're great talking points, but the only way to arrive at them is to either rely wholly on subjectivity or to define terms narrowly. When Chris made his case against the US, he used idiosyncratic definitions--many favorable to the beer-drinking habits of his home country (though, flouting chauvinism, he gives Belgium the nod for overall best beer). To arrive at "best beer country," you have to define your terms. Cases can be made for countries depending on which definitions you emphasize. Britain or Ireland (pub culture), diversity of extant indigenous styles (Belgium), continuity of tradition (Germany), centrality in culture (Czech Republic). I wondered on what basis Canada would stake their claim on Beaumont's blog, but I'm still coming up blank.

America has a right to stake a claim, and one based on more than naive chauvinism. Since 90% of the beer sold here is sold in cans and bottles, it's not based on pub culture. Since our tradition is fractured and mostly recent, it certainly can't be based on continuity. Since we have only a couple indigenous styles (if you're being generous), it's not on native diversity, and since we only drink half as much beer as Czechs--and by some accounts are on target to be come a wine-majority country--we can't claim centrality to culture. And on those dimensions we look up at a not just a few countries who do it better.

But the US does have one thing going for it, a cute little baby I'd prefer not go out with the bathwater. The US, as an immigrant country, cares little about tradition. Because of Prohibition and the consolidation of the 50s-70s, the country lost all memory of beer styles and started over from scratch in 1980. We effectively had no brewing tradition at all then. So when craft brewers came along, they didn't have any tradition to protect. They were happy to steal profligately from Europe--and did. In my Thursday post, I wrote:

Breweries in the United States not only produce every commercial beer style produced everywhere else, but for every commercial beer style produced, a domestic US brewery makes at least a credible example. This includes not just standard British, German, and Belgian styles, but rare specialties like lambics (Allagash). Can any other country make this claim of producing credible examples of all the world's styles? No.

We have breweries like Geary's that have a traditional Yorkshire system, use traditional Yorkshire yeast and ingredients. We have breweries like Victory doing decoction mashing. Rogue has embarked on growing their own barley and floor malting it. Allagash uses a turbid mash and cool ship to produce spontaneously-fermented beer. Sierra Nevada is working with a monastery for the Ovila line. These breweries produce beer that is "credible"--that is, it's as well-made as the European standards. (Let's not get into "best.")

American culture is absorptive and mutable. So far, that defines the expression of American brewing. It means that when a brewery reads about an 18th century style, he's likely to try to make it. It means that somewhere in the country, someone's trying to brew something that's being brewed somewhere else. I readily accept that this may not be purely praiseworthy. But it is distinctive, much in the way beer cultures across the world are distinctive.

My point in overstating the case against Chris was to point out that while America may be very far from being able to claim "best," it doesn't mean the breweries here should be dismissed out of hand. All beer culture--particularly distinctive beer culture--is praiseworthy. And America finally has something distinctive.

The Making of a Mighty Mite

This is a guest post from Oakshire brewer Matt Van Wyk, who graciously agreed to tell the story behind Lil Smokey, his contribution to the Mighty Mites fest. Although I like to think you can tell a brewer's personality by his beers, this post gives you an even better sense of Matt's. If you've found a little insouciance in his beer, now you can see why. Thanks, Matt, for taking the time--


A few months ago, Jeff asked me if I could design a beer for his upcoming session ale fest, Mighty Mite. Of course, I am always honored when people think enough of the beers we make to personally request it. Last winter, on a visit to Eugene with Beeronomics' Patrick Emerson, Jeff got a chance to sample Well-Mannered Gnome, our small beer made from the second runnings of Very Ill Tempered Gnome; I know that Jeff is not one to chase down the latest Quadruple IPA just to be the first to experience it and share it with the world. So I shouldn't have been surprised that they were such a big fan of this little 3% hoppy mild ale. But what I didn't know is that I would be asked to make a beer for one of the events at the first ever Portland Beer Week.

So, I began the arduous task of writing a recipe. But first, the style. It often goes like this: Drink, think. drink, think. Don't you get your best thinking done when you are drinking? Luckily, I get to call that R&D. I figured I would just make a pale ale type beer. Something I knew people would like, even if the alcohol was lower than normal. I started scratching out a recipe. Malt? Easy. Hop?. Don't forget balance. Not to much, not to little. It's pretty difficult to make an exceptional sub 4% abv beer. Usually, there is a lack of body and mouthfeel to help with balance. Flaws could stick out more. Good thing we don't make flaws! You know, maybe I should consult my malt inventory. I don't need much for this beer. And if there is any partial bags that need to be used up, perhaps I can incorporate that? Once I started looking in the malt room I had a change of directions. 5 lbs. of cherrywood smoked malt in that bag, 13 lbs. of smoked malt in that bag. Hey! a full 55 lbs. of unopened smoked malt. Maybe. There's some chocolate malt, some caramel malts. Smoked Porter! Petite smoked porter that is! I decided I'd make a dark beer in the hottest of Oregon months. Perfect.

On brew day, as I was milling the malt, I started tasting the specialty malt. This is something I always do when I am using new or unusual ingredients. I knew the cherrywood smoked malt was old, but only had 5 lbs. Use it up, it smells nice. The other opened bag had less smokey aroma, and sadly, the unopened bag had the least amount of smoke impact. Hmmm... is there enough to call it a smoked porter? I raced to our secondary storage area to see if we had any more smoked malt in house. Nope, I came up empty. Well, I just hoped the lighter body, alcohol, and roast flavors would let the smoke shine through. Brew away, nervously.

At Oakshire, beers like this are part of our single batch series. We make them for draft only and in small (22-24 kegs) batches. Often these beers are never seen again. We have made nearly 30 unique beers in this program so far this year. When then come out, we make unique tap handle stickers (Bryan Taylor of Treeman Design) for each of the single batch beers. I had decided on Lil' Smokey as the name of this beer so had Bryan, our graphics designer, start on the sticker, all the while hoping it was actually smokey. The beer finished fermenting at 3.2%. Hmmm... I'm not sure if this will do it. Of course, I am a huge fan of rauch beers. My threshold might be a little higher than others. Let's get some other feedback. I took an uncarbonated sample to the sales team and to my team of brewers. Is it smokey, I asked? Enough to keep the name? The consensus was that it was mildly smokey, balanced with the rest of the elements. The vote was to keep the name and the already designed logo. (As a side note, round one on the graphic was a factory with smoke, and as I thought that was a little more NW Indiana feeling rather than NW United States, we changed to a campfire).

The result of all this will be served Saturday in Portland at the first Mighty Mite fest. It is a lighter bodied porter of 3.2% with hints of chocolate, roast, and a faint smokey aroma and flavor. It is super easy drinking, even in the 90 degree weather we have been experiencing. So much so that the beer is totally sold out in both Eugene and Portland warehouses, so check with your favorite publican to see if they snatched a keg. If not, what better reason to get over the the festival and try a little sample of this little guy. Cheers!
~Matt Van Wyk