As Americans have taken up saisons, [Dupont is] not the direction they’ve
headed. Instead, they make beers with less assertive, more familiar
esters in the citrus family that are light in hopping and only
medium-dry—something like a kellerbier crossed with a Belgian pale ale.
If you start tracing these beers back to their source, you find
yourself not in Belgium, but just across the border, in Esquelbecq,
France. This is where Daniel Thiriez started his farmhouse brewery (also
named Thiriez) 19 years ago and where he started brewing beers that
look a lot more like American saisons than does Dupont’s.
Next, you might have a gander at Martyn Cornell's most recent, if for no other reason than to remind yourself of the mutable nature of beer style.
Meanwhile, here’s a small rant ... about how Greene King IPA is “not an India Pale Ale”.... You don’t
have a clue what you are talking about.... Do you complain because today’s milds are nothing at all like the mild
ales of 200 years ago, 7% abv and made solely from pale malt? Beers
change, and beer styles are not carved on stone tablets. A 19th century
IPA would have been kept for up to a year in cask, would have lost all
its hop aroma and would have developed a distinctly Brettanomyces
flavour. Nobody at all is brewing an IPA like that.
Oh, and somebody's mad on the internet. And no, not about dress color. But lest you get too hot and bothered, I'd say this is a standard the-world-is-changing, get-off-my-lawn-you-damn-kids wheeze. It really doesn't have anything to do with beer.
Craft beer culture must die, or at least stop taking over all the pubs
where I like to go. If it were contained to its own small bars where I
never drink, it’d just be another niche subculture, where it belongs.
You may recall that 10 Barrel was purchased by AB last year. The
intended outcome of that purchase was that 10 Barrel brands would be
distributed by AB-owned Western Distributing in this area. The problem
is, Maletis owns the franchise rights to 10 Barrel here.
This week our local alt-weekly Willamette Week released their annual beer guide. It includes their picks of the year's best beers and, for the first time ever, winners of the "Oregon Beer Awards" in 15 different categories. Most people are pretty desensitized to best-of lists these days, particularly in this moment of online listicles. Who cares what WW thinks, so goes the thinking, since we all have our own favorites? I've got one foot in that boat, too, but there are a few reasons why this is a good and healthy development.
Upright's Alex Ganum. (WW's Arts and Culture editor,
Martin Cizmar, smiles in the shadows at right.)
Let's start with WW's pick for best beer: Upright Engelberg Pilsner. Awards are only effective so long as they're credible. I absolutely love this pick. It follows pFriem's Strong Dark (2014) and the Commons' Urban Farmhouse (2013)--also excellent choices. They're all good beers, but WW is also effectively using its bully pulpit to identify important beers. Oregon breweries have been trying to make traditional pilsners for decades, and they just never sold. Brewers love them, but the market is a tyrant--no sales, no pilsner. Upright managed to finally break through, though. I suspect it had something to do with restaurants--I would regularly find it on places with well-curated taplists. (Chefs know that pilsners are great with food; they're versatile and won't overwhelm the dishes they've worked so hard to perfect.) Since Upright came out, Oregon has now become a safe port for pilsners, and there are a ton of excellent ones around. I've noticed restaurants often seem to reserve a tap handle for pilsners the way they do for IPAs. Give Alex and Upright a lot of credit for that--and give WW credit for recognizing it.
This hints at why awards may have lasting value. We don't fool ourselves into thinking there is such a thing as a "best" beer--subjectivity can never be quantified. Yet collectively, awards are a great way to give a snapshot to a particular time and place. Willamette Week's awards can't reflect the actual best beers, but they can illuminate where the beer world was at that moment. Awards are really a way of saying, "here's where we were in 2015." Done well, they act both as a pretty good time capsule and year-end wrap up all in one.
Willamette Week publisher Richard Meeker
I don't know if the Oregon Beer Awards will have legs, but I also think it's worthwhile to have a bit of pomp and celebrate an industry. On Monday, WW announced the awards at the Doug Fir Lounge, and there was quite a turnout. Kurt Widmer, rarely sighted in the wild, was in the house. Matt Swihart, rarely cited in Portland, was too. You couldn't swing a bottle of High Life without hitting a brewer (bottles of which started popping up after the beer lines downstairs got too long). I was part of the selection committee that created the categories and made nominations. (It was mostly brewers and people inside the industry, not writers.) WW sent the names of the ten nominees in each category out to a couple hundred industry types for the voting. The recognition came from inside the industry and allowed some smaller entities to shine. It felt like the kind of collegial event that has been the hallmark of Oregon brewing for so long--and I could imagine it surviving well into the future.
So while I don't need WW to tell me what Oregon's best beer is, I'm glad they did anyway.
A fascinating tidbit I thought I'd pass along. Today, Jamie Emmerson and Irene Firmat announced that the company is considering whether to end its Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and merge with an investment firm. This is a little different than the standard A-B news we've been hearing lately. John Holl explains:
The number today of employee owners—called shareholders—is 78, and on
Tuesday Founder and CEO Irene Firmat and Executive Brewmaster Jamie
Emmerson sent a letter to those folks, asking them to vote on a proposal
to merge with a San Francisco-based investment firm....
Shareholders were given ballots earlier today and those votes will be
tallied at the end of the month. If approved, the investors could take
ownership by mid-March. For the existing shareholders there will be a stock-option plan, but
it will no longer be an ESOP company, but Firmat said it will enable
employees to benefit along with the company as it continues to grow....
Firmat noted in an interview that the investors do not have a brewing
background, so they will need the existing employees with their wide
range of expertise to stay on and helm Full Sail. If the vote is
successful, Firmat and Emmerson plan on staying at the brewery they
founded in 1987.
I am not close enough to Full Sail nor smart enough about business to be able to parse this, but maybe some smart reader can give us some insight as to the pluses and minuses for the employees.
Last week I glanced up against the subject of cask ale, and by chance I managed to end the week by encountering an actual glass of the stuff when I had dinner at Deschutes. Bend's finest is one of the last refuges of cask ale in the city, and you can always find two handles devoted to it when you stop in. Rarely, though, do they offer something in the English mode--a low-alcohol, low-hop session beer. As a traditionalist, I love these the best. (Though Ron Pattinson, when he was in town a while back, swooned over the Fresh-Squeezed IPA on cask. It was also on cask last Friday, and I admit I was impressed. Still think the flavors don't go through the full transmutation of smaller beers, but still, mighty impressive.)
I have never had much success convincing people hat 4%, 28 IBU beers are the pinnacle of cask accomplishment, and I may not convince you now. But do me a favor, and drink a pint of real River Ale and see for yourself. (I have no idea if it's still on or how often it comes on--but let this stand as a plea to the brewery to do it often.) The wonderful thing about this beer is that it is 100% American. It's got the classic pale-and-caramel malt base and a troika of juicy American hops (Nugget, Crystal, and Cascade). On cask, the body seems to swell; it's full and rich. The hops are zingy and zesty in that unmistakeable American way. When you swallow, the malts turn golden in your mouth, departing with the essence of honey. It's a lovely duet--American beer, English package, all in perfect harmony.
Make it a point to try this beer if you ever see it there again. I know, I know--IPAs and all that. But I just can't believe you won't be transfixed.
________________ "Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature. In this fallen world, when the number
of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of
magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer. Worse, you
risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at
hand. In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to
have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really
stand out? A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery
mountaintop. I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from
time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it
along to you.
A couple of days ago, I posted a piece on All About Beer wherein I mentioned with some alarm the ubiquity of American-style beers in London. I specifically name-checked The Kernel, and yesterday one of the brewers, Toby Munn, left a really thoughtful comment on the blog. With his permission, I'm reprinting it in full.
_______________________
I commented on your All About Beer page, but I like repeating myself. This is just regarding point 1. These are all valid points, and your concern over the health of
British cask beer is not insignificant. But, I would like to point out
that, although there are a few breweries and a few beers that are
attracting headlines, there are still a huge amount of beers produced
that are quintessentially British.
This is just my tiny little
opinion, but I happen to think that the influx of outside influence is
good for traditional beers and breweries. I think that the younger/newer
drinkers are bringing with them a different, critical look to beers. On
the one hand, traditional brewers are concerned that newer drinkers are
just after a 'grapefruit hit' in their beers, and concerned with only
IBUs and intensity of flavours. In the short term, this may be true,
sadly. Long term, I think that these newer drinkers will understand more
about the technicalities about what makes beer great, and the
subtleties that makes beer great. To reference a post that I think is
perhaps relevant, and almost certainly true. [Note: Toby added that link, not me.]
I
think that the introduction of these different styles and new flavours
is only a good thing. These modern drinkers will have a fuller and more
rounded view and opinion of beers, and are more critical in general. If
we are to follow trends of the US, we will see that producers of truly
great beer are in demand. This, I think, will happen here in the UK, and
elsewhere. Actually, it is evident already.
The problem with
many indigenous beers, whether in Britain, Germany, or, especially,
Belgium, is that, after years and years of little progression, the only
point of difference has been price point, and the only change has been a
deterioration in standard. There are many traditional beers and
breweries that are truly awful. And there are many that have stuck to
their principals and are outstanding. I think with the newer drinkers,
armed with more discerning taste buds, will raise the expectation of
what good beer should be, irrespective of style, and make our tiny
little world of beer a better place. Other opinions are, of course,
available.
When you came to Britain in 2011, I am sure that you
found many beers that were dreadful. Just because it is served from a
cask does not make it good. Similarly, just because a beer is doused in
Mosaic is no guarantee that it is any good.
Your concern for
traditional styles is valid. It is not insignificant. But I believe that
your concern will be proved to be moot.
Let's skip the usual preamble and launch straight into the many interesting tidbits I have collected for you.
1. I have both a new post at All About Beer and one I think I forgot to tease. The new one concerns how London's beer scene looks a lot like ... Portland's (or any American city). They love them some American-style IPAs--but it leaves me wondering who will champion cask. It has already provoked one rebuttal--or call it an addendum--from Boak and Bailey.
The earlier post I forgot to mention emerged from Gigantic's Massive! barley wine, a beer that endures a nine-hour boil. It gave me an opportunity to haul out my old Lacambre and throw around words like "maillard reaction." Read it here.
2. While we're on All About Beer, you might consider checking out this post about the proposed new Mikkeller brewery slated to go into San Diego later this year. Interesting experiment.
3. A beer fest in Reykjavik features two Oregon breweries (of 13 total)--Hopworks and Breakside. From the press release:
“Our focus has been on breweries from Oregon simply because we like the way people from Oregon think and how the craft beer movement has been developing in that particular state,” said Ólafur Ágústsson, restaurant manager at KEX. “We feel that we can connect to people from Portland and all of Oregon. Reykjavik has a lot in common.”
The next question is: how do I swing a junket to Iceland?
4. The rare brewers dinner that features multiple breweries. It's at Higgins and it ain't cheap, but you get the Commons, Crux, Boneyard, Barley Brown, and pFriem in one meal. And Higgins is never cheap, anyway. I do wish more restaurants would do this kind of thing. Italian beer dinners, German beer dinners, sour beer dinners--there are many organizing principles one can deploy that don't involve one brewery.
5. We drink less beer. Ron Pattinson has a fascinating group of charts showing how much less we drink now than we used to. In the past fifty years, per-capita beer consumption has fallen markedly:
Belgium, -38%
(West) Germany, -6%
UK, -25%
The US is slightly weird because of prohibition, but another chart, in which he looks at the last six years, is equally interesting:
Belgium, -12%
Czech Republic, -9%
Germany, -4%
Ireland, -20%
Netherlands, -11%
UK, -21%
So the period corresponding to the biggest worldwide brewery boom in--well, forever--is also the period in which per capita consumption is tanking. (True in the US, too, though numbers are lagging. Consumption fell 7% from '08 to '11.)
6. According to my Facebook alerts, February 18th is the birthday of Crux's Larry Sidor, Pink Boots' Teri Fahrendorf, and Double Mountain's Matt Swihart. That seems like a damned impressive coincidence.
The Oregon Hophouse has recently been running a little experiment. They invited patrons to try a flight of twelve IPAs and vote on their favorites. In a certain sense, the free market functions as a way of determining patrons' favorite beers, too. But in that case, people may be influenced by price, ad campaigns, the image of a brewery, peer pressure, or proximity. Here it was just twelve unmarked beers and the palates of the tasters. The flight contained:
Barley Brown’s Pallet Jack
Boneyard RPM
Breakside IPA
Crux Outcast
Double Mountain Hop Lava
Fort George Vortex
Gigantic IPA
Goodlife Descender
Hop Valley Alphadelic
Laurelwood Workhorse
Migration Luscious Lupulin
Ninkasi Total Domination
Care to guess which one came out on top? Before I tell you, last year the champeen was Boneyard--but the beers weren't served blind. This year, 864 people cast a ballot and the results looked like this:
I'm interested in this experiment because I think it tracks the momentary preferences of Oregonians. Boneyard has definitely been the most recent example of the Oregon palate, with its thick body and saturated late-addition flavors and aromas. Pallet Jack is lighter and sharper and more dank--to me it seems a bit more Californian. (A characterization I suspect would make a good Baker Citian cringe.) Breakside is a more classic interpretation, with tons of citrus and a hint of pine. So does this suggest a move away from the Boneyard mode to something a little more universal? Probably that's going too far--Boneyard did hang in at a respectable third. But still, it's at least suggestive.
Interesting side-note. In an email, the Hophouse's Kirsten Seitz added this bit of detail: "Breakside was in fourth/fifth place until the third week, when both locations saw a drastic increase in votes for Breakside. It even earned the most votes during a week at each location in total votes, but it still wasn't enough to surpass Pallet Jack's monthly totals. It was incredibly interesting to witness the change, and the staff felt certain that it was a new batch of Breakside." I offer that without a lot of commentary--though I'd love it if someone from Breakside would care to weigh in with theories.
________________
*Does this prove Pallet Jack is definitively Portland's fave IPA? No. It was not a scientific study and there are any number of variables that were not controlled for. But it was a blind tasting, and so I'd be leery to dismiss it outright, either.
A few months back, I mentioned trying an experiment with spontaneous yeast. I was racking a batch of spontaneously-fermented cider, and when I discovered that lovely yeast cake at the bottom of the carboy, I wished I had some wort to throw on it. Well, I got another bite at the ... err, another chance. Kevin Zielinski, who makes some of the best cider in America, set me up with ten gallons of juice from his orchards (a mix of mostly French and some English bittersweet varieties). He suggested I try one in the English mode, racked once and fermented to dry, and once in the French mode, with multiple rackings to try to get the yeast to exhaust the nutrients in the juice and go dormant (which is how they end up with sweet ciders that don't turn the bottles into bombs).
In any case, this afternoon I finished up a three-gallon batch of wort and transferred it to the barm of one of those ciders. It smells like a great ferment has begun, with a lovely, fresh juice aroma and the beginnings of that wild yeast funk (and a bit of sulfur, which Kevin says is normal). If this works, I'm going to call it "spontaneous by proxy" and hope the title catches on. Of course, if it doesn't work I'll call it "a debacle" and hope everyone forgets quickly and moves along.
I am slightly less sanguine than I was before, though, owing to the lab report Kevin shared with me of the yeast and bacteria found in the juice sample. It has lots of saccharomyces, which is great, and very little brettanomyces, which is curious. But it also has tons of acetic acid bacteria, something called Hanseniaspora uvarum, and something else called Pichia membranifaciens. I can't predict whether these would normally be found in a spontaneously-fermented beer, so who knows what they'll do in my wort.
Whatever happens, never fear--I'll let you know.
Update. Well that was fast. The yeast cake went into the wort at about 3pm yesterday, and by 7 this morning it was rocking. I'd chilled the wort down to 55 so the yeast wouldn't be shocked by warm temps (the apple juice is outside and is probably around 45-48). I therefore expected a slow ramp-up, but no:
(And to be clear, I don't leave the carboy on the sunny deck to ferment--that was for photographic purposes only.)
Yesterday, a ripple went through social media about a proposed bill in Maine that would make "cheater pints" illegal. This is an issue dear to my heart, and one with which I have some history. Years ago, I attempted (in my usual, half-assed bloggy way) to be an advocate for "Honest pints." When you go to a gas station, you don't worry about getting 120 ounce gallons; a quart of milk may not be 29.2 ounces. So why on earth should we allow a pint of beer to be 12-15 ounces, as it regularly is in pubs and restaurants around the country?
That said, I'm not entirely sure Maine's strategy will be effective. As that Guardian article describes (with, full disclosure, lots of quotes from me), this has already been a two-time loser. It generally comes down to cost and enforcement. Most everyone agrees that the idea is good (those willfully cheating customers excepted), but putting a regulatory and enforcement structure in place causes people to balk. A point foes rush to make:
It was a point echoed by Sean Sullivan of the Maine Brewers' Guild. "We
believe that crafting a beer-specific bill, targeting something that is
already illegal, and shifting enforcement responsibilities to our
already-overburdened liquor enforcement officials, would not be useful,"
Sullivan said.
I'm not actually convinced this is a legitimate argument (foes are never disinterested bystanders), but it does appear to be an effective one. Somehow the burden does not overwhelm the governments in Germany, the Czech Republic, and the UK. The bill is completely vestigial now, and with public policy, the devil is always in the small print. If they do pull it off, it could be a beachhead for future legislation. Godspeed, Mainers, may you go where no Americans have gone before!
Last week we had some nice chat about a large beer brand proudly proclaiming itself "macro." When one of these craft-vs-macro debates springs up, we always get lost in the definition weeds: what do the terms mean? Back at the dawn of the new-brewery age, there actually was a standard charge against macro (a term born when craft beer was "micro"). It was made cheaply of filler ingredients, hid that it was made in a factory plant far removed from the town it claimed to be from, was owned by a foreign company, and survived mainly because of a massive ad campaign that kept the truth hidden and the reality safely locked away.
That actually doesn't sound like last week's macro--Budweiser--which has always been extremely forthright about their beer and production. It does, however, perfectly describe Newcastle. Behold:
A spokesman for Heineken confirmed: “We are in the process of changing our
recipe for Newcastle Brown Ale and it will no longer include caramel
colouring.
“We will now achieve the distinctive colouring and flavour of Newcastle Brown
Ale, that our consumers enjoy, by using roasted malts instead.”
This is pretty amazing--and revealing. I thought caramel coloring went out with leisure suits. I heard rumors that various companies would turn their regular lagers into "dark lagers" with judicious use of caramel color, but those were crude times when people thought "dark lager" was something impossibly exotic. That Newcastle, presumably to shave a few pennies off the bottom line, has been using it well into the new millennium--well, just spectacular. Better to spend all the money on ads like these instead:
Other things to know: the brand is owned by Heineken and brewed in this brewery, in Tadcaster, by John Smith's:
It is largely an export product. Boak and Bailey, who sent me a wonderful report showing that it has only 4.5% of the bottled ale market in the UK (and ales are a wee minority of the beer market), said, "We've only ever seen it in bottles but it's pretty widely available in pubs in that format, hidden behind the bar in the fridges next to Hofmeister Pils and Mann's Brown Ale." Mark Dredge agreed, "You might see it occasionally in supermarkets or a dusty bottle at the back of a bar fridge, but that's about it."
For what it's worth, when I was writing The Beer Bible, I tried to contact someone from the Newcastle division to hear about how the beer was made and maybe get some archival photography. It was I think the only English-language brand that completely blew me off. I have a clearer sense why now.
So to recap: made cheaply of filler ingredients? Check. Hid where it was made while still trading on the reputation of the old location? Check. Owned by a foreign company? Check. And finally, keeps the truth safely hidden away behind a massive ad campaign? Check and check.
You want an authentically crap beer where the cost of production is scrimped on to make way for the cost of sales? You could hardly do better than Newcastle Brown.
There's been entirely too much chat about the business of beer: let's talk about beer itself for a change. Today's selection comes to us from Hood River, where Double Mountain founder and orchard-owner Matt Swihart has been making tasty fruit beers for several years. His pièce de résistance is Devil's Kriek, a wild cherry ale that bubbles away under a Brettanomcyes cap over in one corner of the brewery throughout the year. He may actually have topped himself with My Little Runaway, however, which is one of the best beers I've tried in recent memory.
There's not a ton of info about Runaway except that it was fermented with the Ardennes yeast, made with Van and Bing cherries and "a tiny stolen blend of next year's Devil Kriek to commingle as sweet, refreshing cherry ale with the ghost of bitterness." (Someone at the brewery has lately gotten poetic with the press releases.) I considered trying to track down more info, but sometimes the less you know, the more you taste, so I let my mouth give me the tour.
Superficially, Runaway presents itself like a light frolic of sweetness and cherries, frothy and kissed with sweetness. Uncareful tasters might not notice anything more and be plenty happy with that. But there's more going on. It's got a touch of acidity, which gives it some vinous balance (I think wine drinkers would absolutely love this beer). A mouthful evolves in short order past the fruit into something earthy and spicy, which read to me like tannins. (Cherry pits?) A hint of leathery Brettanomcyes accentuates this quality and also dries the beer out as you swallow. It is a wild ale, but just barely--and in this I think there's a lesson. Breweries often let their wild beasts roam too freely, and the aggressively sour and/or dry beers that result are too much for all except the most inveterate sour-heads. If all wild ales were at
this level of intensity, though, they could find a mass audience. (Maybe the fact that the label nowhere identifies it as such is telling.) It's hard to imagine who wouldn't enjoy this beer.
There has been a lot of talk about brewery ownership structures and "fussy" beers lately, and My Little Runaway is instructive for another reason. It may well have mass appeal, but it's the kind of beer that's probably almost impossible to make on a mass scale. It employs whole fruit, which is a pain in the ass to work with in large volumes, but more importantly gets its secret ingredient from an aging wild ale, the king of the unscalable beers. You might be able to find a workaround to get a beer something like this if you wanted to brew 2 million barrels, but those spicy tannins, that delicate dryness--I can't imagine how you could mass-market that. Little breweries often make the best beer because some of the best beer can't be made in giant volumes.
Do yourself a favor and track down My Little Runaway (bottles are supposed to be available in PDX, but if you happen to be in the Gorge, make a special trip to Double Mountain)--it will remind you of just how good beer can be.
_______________________ "Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature. In this fallen world, when the number
of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of
magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer. Worse, you
risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at
hand. In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to
have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really
stand out? A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery
mountaintop. I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from
time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it
along to you.
This is easily one of the most interesting beer ads I've ever seen:
"Budweiser, proudly a macro beer. It's not brewed to be fussed over." (Shot of a contemptible hipster with old-timey stache.) A bit later, "It's brewed for drinking, not dissecting." (More contemptible snobs.) "Let them drink their pumpkin peach ale." There's a bunch of other familiar text in there, but when the minute-long add winds up to its booming conclusion with the tag "this Bud's for you," it carries a different resonance. This Bud, the brewing giant says with a wink, is for you, not one of those poncey hipsters.
It's not even subtext--it's text. Budweiser VP Brian Perkins told Ad Age that "occasionally we do have a little bit of fun with some of the overwrought
pretentiousness that exists in some small corners of the beer landscape
that is around beer snobbery. That is the antithesis of what Budweiser
is all about."
This is not a beer ad targeted toward you and me. It's an ad targeted at the huge slice of people who are casual, promiscuous drinkers who might go for a Bud, a Blue Moon or a Sierra Nevada Pale depending on their mood. Mass market lagers have been taking a beating among that cohort, and Bud's ad is bid to reel them back in. Those drinkers are attracted to new things said to be tasty, and the ad is an attempt to remind them that Anheuser-Busch believes their beer is plenty full of cred, thanks. It's a fascinating ad because it's unexpectedly pointed and effective.
More thoughts:
1. The big companies can no longer ignore craft brewing (and I use that term advisedly). It was a contemptuous acknowledgement, but the shots at dissecting pumpkin peach ales are still an acknowledgement.
2. It definitely tweaked a lot of people, but they're wrong to call it "defensive." That's echo-chamber thinking. Many craft fans have internalized the narrative that Bud is both evil and low-grade. But Bud never accepted those terms--nor have the millions who continue to drink the beer. To them, this looks like the appropriate retort to a bunch of hipper-than-thou snobs. It wasn't targeted at the beer geek, whom Bud has already lost. What really looks defensive are the responses from the geek community who are miffed that Bud is using exactly the same tone (in-your-face, irreverent, dismissive of the competition) that craft has been using for thirty years against Bud.
3. This approach won't stop Bud's decline. The truth is, we are a vast, diverse country, and the idea that any single flavor could so totally dominate the market as mass market lagers did for decades, is impossible to entertain in the 21st century. What is Bud's natural market--16 million barrels (today's figure), 10 million, 5 million? Hard to say, but no ad campaign is going to reverse the diversification of the market in beer.
4. It might well slow Bud's decline, though. Throughout the decades from the 1960s through the 1980s, big beer companies had honed their advertising strategies to compete against each other over a pretty indistinguishable commodity (fizzy pale lagers). They didn't advertise beer--they advertised frogs and dogs and lots and lots of bikini-clad women. It became self-parody, and made it very easy for competitors to paint these products as industrial crap fit only for gullible rubes. That's all fine if the product is a commodity, but once craft brewers came along, it changed the calculus. If those fizzy light lagers are going to hold onto some share of the market, they're going to have to make a pitch for the beer. This ad suggests that Bud may have gotten the memo.
5. "Craft beer" (again, using that term advisedly) had better watch it's own image. The fact that The New Yorker and Budweiser are both mocking craft beer is not so good for craft beer. Hipsters are probably the single most hated group in America (so much so that I don't think I've ever heard anyone call himself one), so this association is not good. Craft beer could take a lesson from the bigs on this point: beer is the common man's drink. The more craft beer is known as a white, upper-class, urban, metrosexual drink, the more it will be ripe for mocking.
No grand conclusions here--it's just all fascinating to see. We do live in interesting times, don't we?
Good luck trying to find some Sam Adams Boston Lager in Portland. It's been a long time since I've bothered to look for any--I need it for symbolic purposes for a little party that begins this afternoon--and I had no idea what a rarity it has become. The five sixers that constitute the usual stock at my local Fred Meyer* were long raided, and shoppers could not bring themselves to snag that last sixer of Sam Adams Light. There were a few Rebel IPAs left--but as symbolism goes, "west-coast style IPA" doesn't really get it done.
So off I went to Plaid Pantry**. Apparently they don't stock it at all. (Thirty brands of local beer, a few mass markets, but nothing from BostonCincinnati. Then to Zupan's***. Nyet. Finally a hail Mary to Belmont Station, one of Portland's best bottle shops--and success! Ordering maven Chris Ormand had the good sense to make sure some Boston Lager was on the shelves for just such an occasion. I think there's something instructive in this story, but I'm not entirely sure what it is. Just that, I suppose, a beer I thought was absolutely ubiquitous turns out not to be. Good thing Jim Koch has that cider thing to fall back on. Had I wanted a sixer of Angry Orchard, I could have gotten that anywhere.
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*Fred Meyer ("Freddy's" to locals) is an old local supermarket chain. It's owned by Kroger, but Fred Meyer was beloved to locals, and the home office--also in Cincinnati--made the wise decision to leave the name. The stores are giant and have hundreds of beers and ciders for sale.
***Zupan's is a local high-end food market chain. Also a huge selection of beer. That we have so many weird local businesses is probably also instructive, but we'll leave that rumination for later.
Let’s try a thought experiment. I’ll offer the name of a brewery and
you notice the first few things that spring to mind. Ready? Sierra
Nevada. Unless you’re really not into beer—and then, why are you reading
this?—something should have popped into your head. OK, here’s another: Dogfish Head. Or here, try this juicy one: Lagunitas.
We have strangely complex relationships with breweries. The mention
of a name produces a tangle of impressions, memories, opinions,
prejudices and emotions. Unlike many product companies—soap makers,
snack food companies, pharmaceutical firms—breweries inspire feelings.
You’ve had a lot more meaningful experiences with a beer in your hand
than, say, doing laundry.
It’s hard enough for small breweries to make the leap from beloved
little-guy to corporate property without suffering some brand damage.
For Elysian, a brewery where the brand relied heavily on that small,
outsider status, the leap will be a good deal higher.
File this under "random." From the American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry comes this finding about an element in hops:
One compound found in hops, called xanthohumol, has gotten the attention of researchers for its potential benefits, including antioxidation, cardiovascular protection and anticancer properties. Fang's team decided to test xanthohumol's effects on brain cells. In lab tests, the researchers found that the compound could protect neuronal cells and potentially help slow the development of brain disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
(The pdf--where you can read sentences like " this cytoprotection is mediated by the induction of endogenous antioxidant defense 522 molecules, which relies on the α, β 2unsaturated ketone structure in Xn and the transcr iption 523 factor Nrf2 in PC12 cells as removal of such chemic al structure or knockdown of Nrf2 524 abolishes the protection"--is here.)
But speaking of Alzheimer's, I recently came across the results of an even more remarkable study (bold mine):
“THC is known to be a potent antioxidant with neuroprotective
properties, but this is the first report that the compound directly
affects Alzheimer’s pathology by decreasing amyloid beta levels,
inhibiting its aggregation, and enhancing mitochondrial function,”
stated study lead author Chuanhai Cao, PhD and a neuroscientist at the
Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute and the USF College of Pharmacy.
What that means is not only does THC guard against plaque buildup in the brain, but by "enhancing mitochondrial function," it may even reverse the process. And for what it's worth, this follows other (proper, peer-reviewed) research that found similar results.
So make sure that older loved one in your life has an IPA and tasty THC edible for dinner--it's good for the brain.
A funny thing happened on the way Elysian's public flogging. There I was, bracing for another round of "Judas" called collectively from the internet. If 10 Barrel Brewing, a nice outfit but certainly nothing like the beating heart of Bend, could generate a week's worth of existential angst, then authentically beloved Elysian would surely cause Facebook to crash. Instead, a somewhat large group went immediately on AB InBev defense--or made something like the "meh" argument. I saw comments like this everywhere, but I'll single out the estimable Jordan St. John, who wrote one of the more entertaining versions on my blog Facebook page.
People buy the narrative of small underdog companies vs large companies
and they are intended to do so because it plays on their innate
acceptance of binary narrative even though it is patently not the
reality of the situation which includes thousands of parts moving
independently in a finite market.
Go
look at the language in the comments of various websites who have
reported this and tell me that the sudden hatred of Elysian on the part
of long time loyalists is a rational reaction to the potential that the
beer may shift in quality two years from now. It simply isn't. The craft
beer narrative of the hero's quest and the idea that the "underdogs"
must be the hero because there is an empire that they are up against is
collapsing because the lines muddy when faced with what has always been a
generational industry. It's the reaction to a hulk hogan heel turn or
Anakin turning to the dark side. It's not the reaction to a potential
quality shift that may or may not happen eventually.
You don't want AB InBev to own this brewery. Really.
This leaves us in an interesting place. The default position holds that buy-outs are bad for diversity, bad for the bought-out brewery, and bad for beer. But there's a second sentiment, like Jordan's, which argues that it's all business and who cares who owns a brewery so long as the beer is good. Can these views be reconciled? In philosophy and logic, there's a concept known as "dialectic," which indicates a train of reasoning that flushes out bad thinking and gets at the truth. There are many different versions of dialectics (it goes back to the Greeks), and it seems like we need one to interpret consolidation. Allow me. 1. AB InBev is not evil, it's just a company. It's true. AB InBev is a large company that (like small breweries) sells beer. Beer companies are morally neutral entities, and what they do is sell widgets. To associate moral value with any brewery is to make the argument that there is a higher way to sell beer, and that's obviously not defensible. 2. Little breweries are not virtuous; like multinational conglomerates, they're just companies. For reasons I shouldn't have to enumerate, I love beer. But the notion that little companies are doing something categorically different than multinational conglomerates by making and selling beer is absurd. They're breweries. Smart people have decided to quit the idea that there's craft beer and then some other, lesser category. There's beer and then there's, well, beer. It's all made in breweries of malt, hops, water, and yeast (and increasingly, other things). Companies that make this substance sell it on open markets. Some are big companies, some are wee.
3. You can't judge the quality of beer by the size of the brewery. Fans of American craft beer take it as gospel that big companies make "crap" and little breweries make good beer. This is not true. Big breweries make beer that millions buy. It may not be the beer I love, but that doesn't make it crap. In many cases, mass market lagers are the cleanest and most consistent beers on the market. One of the common stories told back in the 1980s was that big breweries used "additives" and chemicals to their beer--it was one of the arguments in favor of small-scale brewing. I dunno, maybe some did (I'm no historian). But as far as I can tell now, that's total hogwash. Oh, and plenty of little breweries make pond water. Like, literally. I'm pretty sure I recall finding a pollywog in an ESB once. Little breweries make plenty of crap. 4. Big companies have a lot of power in the marketplace and don't love competition. You have to be willfully forgetful to acquit Anheuser-Busch of being a malignant force in beer diversity in the 21st century. There were 700 breweries following Prohibition, and A-B (and other giants) ran almost all of them out of business by 1980, when there were only 80 breweries left. They did this by being bigger and more efficient, sure, but they also used bare-knuckle business tactics to dominate distribution, rig local laws in their favor, and buy out everyone they couldn't drive out. Given a choice between competing against a few other companies in a stable market and competing against a hugely fragmented competition in a volatile market, they would--they have--chosen the latter. 5. Local breweries keep traditions alive. Companies are people. Here in Portland, I know the majority of brewers in the city. They're my neighbors and members of my community. They employ my neighbors and other members of my community. That alone is reason enough to at least be prejudiced toward local breweries, but there's a much more important reason. Beer is one of the most varied products on earth, and that diversity comes from the preferences of locals who, say, favor dark ales in Dusseldorf and light lagers in Munich. There was a mass extinction following the Second World War when cheap, commodified beer displaced more expensive local styles. Dozens of funky, interesting types of beer vanished from the earth. Here's Frank Boon telling Belgium's story (from an interview I did with him):
“Forty years ago, this was a time when breweries were closing and all the local styles were disappearing. Everywhere in Belgium. Louvain white disappeared, Peeterman disappeared, [ascot beers?] disappeared. In the 1950s and 1960s they switched to cheaper and technically better beer. In every village and small town, brewers said the only thing we can do is sell the brewery. There is no future for small breweries. If gueuze had disappeared in the 1960s, nobody would ever have imagined to make such a beer. It’s an absolutely crazy way to make beer.”
There are cases in which the existence of one or two single breweries--Dupont, Schneider, Schlenkerla and Spezial--kept a beer alive. These are never multinational conglomerates, but family breweries keeping traditions alive. The more breweries there are--particularly funky little breweries that can make a living by selling niche beer--the more diversity that will survive. Sometimes people denigrate the support for local breweries as mere sentimentality, but the consequences for losing them are not insignificant.
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To finally get off the ramble, here's the upshot. Like Jordan says, it's best to avoid thinking of these things in moralistic terms. It's clarifying to recognize that beer is beer. However, that doesn't mean that one beer is as good or valuable as the next. In the aggregate, we want a market where lots of breweries are competing to make the best beer. Recent history has shown that consolidation isn't good for good beer. Each brewery is a node in the diversity of the ecosystem--and some are more important than others. 10 Barrel? Meh. I'm not sure that they were really doing anything to increase biodiversity. But Elysian, which was early on the scene with botanicals, which helped launch (God help us) the annual pumpkin frenzy, and which could make beers like this, had its own, unique flavor. Those kinds of breweries are important, and it's perfectly reasonable to lament their absorption into a multinational conglomerate.
St. LOUIS and SEATTLE (January 23, 2015) – Anheuser-Busch today announced it has agreed to purchase Elysian Brewing Company, based in Seattle, Washington....
Joe Bisacca, Elysian CEO and co-founder [...] will continue with Elysian along with his partners, Dick Cantwell and David Buhler. “After a lot of hard work, we’ve grown from one Seattle brewpub to four pub locations and a production brewery. With the support of Anheuser-Busch, we will build on past successes and share our beers with more beer lovers moving forward.”
Wow. Weeks ago, when AB snatched 10 Barrel, I observed that their strategy appeared to revolve around finding independent breweries with impeccable cred, and they could hardly have done better than Elysian. It's long been my favorite Washington brewery, and it's always my first stop when I hit Seattle. It has always seemed the most Seattle of the Seattle breweries--an extemporaneous brewery that could be equal parts gritty and urbane and credibly support local sports teams or indie bands. Elysian always seemed to be right where Seattle was a the time.
Will this change? I'm normally agnostic about ownership structures, but as a fan, this is at least a little alarming. But as I've been saying for years now: welcome to the big new world of craft brewing.
Update. Why does this rattle me--admittedly not a local, but local-adjacent? A
big part of Elysian's allure was how well they represented Seattle and
the heartbeat of the city. Just because a brewery is local doesn't mean
it can channel the local mores, culture, and zeitgeist. Elysian could
and did--which is a big part of why they were so good. Can they still
do that as a division of AB? In the short term, almost certainly. But I
fear we've lost a little bit of what made Seattle Seattle. Or put another way:
The Onion's Clickhole is the latest to try to wring a smile by poking fun at beer. But even the Onion can't do it. It's a quiz to find out if you're really a beer snob, but the answers are strained and boring:
I have a private mix of the song “Closing Time” by Semisonic where the
line “Finish your whiskey or beer” is altered so that the word “whiskey”
is bleeped out.
One time, I was pretty sure I heard a statue say “Miller High Life,” so I had to blow up the statue with a bomb.
Etc.
The one mildly amusing thing is that you must check every box to be called a snob--even all but one gets you "moderate" standing. But beer's just not funny. The key to comedy is surprise, and beer geekery is way still too obscure. No one gets the in-jokes. It's why celebrity comedy and observational comedy are always popular--you know the crowd is going to get it.
We'll know beer has arrived when Stephen Colbert tells a gose joke and your father chuckles.
As my weekly blogging over at All About Beer becomes a routinized thing, I'll alert you to posts more rarely. However, you might be interested in today's post, which addresses the issue of expert opinion versus the wisdom of hive mind. In terms of beer evaluation and review, I argue that we don't want to throw the former out entirely.
It is characteristic of this moment in American history that we hold
experts in contempt and valorize the global hive mind. Critics are
vanishing faster than tropical reefs, and we now rely on sites like Yelp
and Good Reads and Amazon to tell us what to buy or read or patronize.
There are many reasons why these sites have made us better consumers
and, in some cases, better-educated. But the hive mind has a tendency to
elevate mass opinion and codify conventional wisdom (even when that
“wisdom” is grossly errant). The phenomenon is so pernicious it can even infect non-crowd-sourced information.
If you trusted BeerAdvocate with the authority to decide on Burton
Bridge’s Olde Expensive, you’d have been sent down a blind alley.
In making the argument, I pivot off the words of local beer luminary Bill Schneller, so go have a look and see what you think.
Now that the holidays are safely past, it's time to get back to the Dive Bar Challenge. Recap: this series is a barometer to determine just how far good beer has seeped into the crevices of supposedly good beer cities. I'm testing the waters here in Portland, but if enterprising bloggers elsewhere felt their cities stacked up against Beervana, we could have a friendly competition. Either way, the idea is that good beer towns should be measured by the places you are least likely to find good beer, not the best. (Read more here.)
Today's entrant is the oddly-punctuated 'Reel M' Inn Tavern. It is located along the no longer scuzzy segment of Southeast Division Street, but stands testament to what once was. (Indeed, after the inaugural Challenge, Bill Night suggested it as a "true dive"--and challenge accepted.) At some point in the not-distant future, we'll get into the philosophical nature of the term "dive bar," but I think 'Reel M' Inn (henceforth "the Reel") passes muster. It is the kind of place where, on a late Friday afternoon, you'll find guys drinking mass market lager and bourbon shots at the bar (two examples) while others choose rum and coke while feeding their video poker jones (one). Another patron had a Hamm's tallboy, pulled from a case that has a wide selection of talls for the discriminating customer. The sole video game is played with a rifle.
Its been a decade since I've been in the Reel, but it seems little
changed. Nevertheless, four of the six taps were local: Worthy IPA,
Manny's Pale, Breakside Irish Stout, and something from Hop Valley. Here's your tale of the tape:
The Stats*
Breweries in ZIP code: 8
Distance from the heart of downtown: 2.6 miles
Neighborhood hipness factor (1-5): 2.5, transitioning
Seediness factor (1-5): 2, homey
Beers on tap: 6
Mass market beers: 2 (Coors Light, Pabst)
Craft beers: 4
Imports: 0
Ciders: 0
Verdict: Pretty crafty
Overall, the Reel has a lot to recommend it. The bartender was super, and my stout was fresh and clean. The guy next to me at the bar was friendly and welcoming. Like so many dive bars, the music was retro, but well-curated, oscillating between louche 70s (Bowie and Steely Dan) to crunchy rock (Grateful Dead, Neil Young). It's been a decade since I've been in the Reel, but it seems little
changed. Except the beer. Not only were two-thirds of the taps local (Worthy IPA,
Manny's Pale, Breakside Irish Stout, and something from Hop Valley), but they were all high-cred local, not just gestures like Redhook and Pyramid toward a new, incomprehensible customer. The Reel is serving people who like good, local ales, and they've chosen taps to appeal to them.
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*Breweries in ZIP code determined by the Oregon Brewers Guild listing. I selected Pioneer Courthouse Square, "Portland's living room" as the heart of downtown.
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