Category: BeerAdvocate Mag

When Size Matters: A Few Thoughts On Nano-brewing…

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Homebrewers call it “living the dream.” Newspapers herald “the next wave of craft brewing” in their food and beverage sections. From tiny garages to converted basement rec rooms and closet sized industrial spaces, a new trend is emerging in the world of American craft beer. And it worries me.

For the times that micro just isn’t small enough, I present for you, the nano-brewery. No solid definition exists as to exactly how small a brewery has to be to qualify as nano, but the practice has grown sufficiently popular as to attract the attention of federal regulators. The Alcohol Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) recently issued a friendly reminder to homebrewers looking to go pro that their efforts lose tax exempt status after 100 gallons if production per year. Unofficial designations suggest systems of one-half to two barrels in size qualify as nano. Simply put, we’re talking about an infinitesimal amount of beer, basically a supped up home brewing operation.

But what the nanos lack in size, they’re more than making up for in numbers, with more than fifty opening in the last two years, and another several dozen in development around the country. Despite their professional appearances, these nano-brewers can’t afford to quit their day jobs but they are making some brewers concerned for theirs.

While the nanos produce beer only thirty or so gallons at a time, their beers command substantial premiums in the marketplace. One New England nano has released as few as three dozen bottles per batch, leading stores and consumers to clamor for the seemingly limited edition beers, with prices exceeding twenty bucks a bottle. With these beers increasingly populating store shelves, some brewers have concerns about the artificial inflation of prices that may follow in their wake.

Beyond pricing issues, I have to admit some personal wariness over the quality of the many nano beers that I have sampled over the last year. While our industry lives the maxim that small is beautiful, there may be such a thing as being too small. With size comes a need for consistency and solid processes, challenges that many nanos have never really addressed. To distinguish themselves from other craft brewers and in celebration of the freedom accompanying their diminutive stature, many nanos instead choose to brew beers whose assertiveness borders on the caustic. Often big, boozy or hop bomb in character, these Pollock-esque offerings provide not ready for prime-time players plenty of cover to hide brewing flaws that would otherwise smack consumers in the face.

But as craft beer drinkers become more savvy, poorly produced beers from any brewery can give craft beer everywhere a bad name. It’s like the mid-nineties all over again, just in reverse, where the threat comes from well-meaning homebrewers instead of cash hungry businessmen.

The nano brewing phenomenon has also fueled a certain level of craft beer fan boyism, preaching a love of the limited, a worship of rarity for its own sake, that I believe damages craft beer. With blinders on, these yes men encourage under-performing nanos to continue making poor beer. But with such small batch sizes and a built-in fan base, these bad breweries have no incentive to dump an off-beer.

With all of this said, many great breweries, including Dogfish Head, started on an extremely small scale and there are many nanos that make quality beers. But as with many homebrews, there is no replacing professionally brewed beers. The introduction of fresh, energized talent into the craft brewing scene is certainly exciting. I’m just not sold on the concept or products the nanos represent just yet. Getting into the craft brewing business should be hard and not every homebrewer has what it takes to go pro. It’s a good thing that dreams don’t always come true.

–Article appeared in Issue 46 of BeerAdvocate Magazine.

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Chicago’s Craft Beer Pioneers: Goose Island’s John and Greg Hall

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Despite its name, the Goose Island Beer Company’s headquarters and main production brewery is not located on the miniscule, 160 acre artificial island splitting the Chicago River. Instead, the brewery’s Near West Side industrial location acts as a fitting tribute to the bare-knuckled nature of the city’s beer trade and to the dedicated family behind it.

Founder John Hall, of the paper packaging trade, opened Goose Island’s first brewpub on Clybourn Street in 1988, where the flagship Honker’s Ale eventually led to the opening of the Fulton Street production brewery and a Wrigleyville pub. Greg Hall, then a college student studying creative writing, joined his father’s team as a lowly brewer’s assistant, doing grunt work, before attending the Siebel brewing school and eventually becoming the brewmaster.

Together, the pioneering Hall’s make a formidable pair, balancing business acumen and a love of flavorful beer. Far removed from the days of Hex Nut Brown Ale, Goose Island now produces some of the most flavor-forward craft beers available in America. The brewery also runs one of the nation’s largest barrel aging programs, which sprawls out through warehouses on both sides of Fulton Street. In these wooden vessels sleep Bourbon County Stout and other rare treats.

Beyond building a solid portfolio of core brands, including President Obama’s favored 312, the Hall’s have focused much of their recent efforts on developing an eclectic line-up of Belgian-style ales. Devoted proponents of the joys of bringing beer and food back to its rightful place at the table, Goose Island hosts frequent beer dinners, cheese tastings, and has even brewed a beer for one of celebrity chef Rick Bayless’s restaurants.

Despite all of Goose Island’s successes, the city’s notoriously competitive distribution challenges in part led to the brewery’s decision in 2006 to enter into an equity agreement with the Widmer Brothers Brewery and the Craft Brewers Alliance, which has ties with Anheuser-Busch InBev. With their decision quickly came harsh words from self-appointed craft beer purists. Greg Hall quickly dismisses the criticism by noting that the big guys give them better access to market but “zero direction whatsoever” as to the beer. For others he jokes, “Can’t you taste the beechwood in there? Don’t you think it makes it taste better?” Simply put, “the beer is coming on a different truck now, but it’s the same beer from the same brewery and people.”

With such an enviable and bold line-up of top-notch beers, good luck convincing the happy patrons at the brewery’s pubs that they aren’t drinking craft beer. You’d get a better response rooting for the White Sox on the corner of Clark and Addison.

-Article appeared in Issue 49 of BeerAdvocate Magazine.

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Craft Beer, All Growed Up…

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All grown up and ready to don his crown, the prince busily makes plans for the future. All hail the new king of beer. If you read the beer press lately, you’d be forgiven for thinking that craft beer has conquered all. The Brewers Association’s recently released half-year numbers demonstrate that despite the economic downturn, craft beer sales continue to boom by double-digits, to the enduring shame of macro beer producers. Without question, no other brewing industry segment can touch craft’s fire.

But before we start the next round of mutual back-slapping and pint raising, America’s smaller brewers should stop and consider the decidedly unsettled course of American beer’s future. We have lived through the Age of Extreme and experienced the Era of Collaboration, reveling in years of unparalleled success. Yet the toughest times lie ahead as craft brewers move from the lighthearted teenage growing years to the increasingly responsible adult decades.

For one, succession issues will continue to pose challenges for brewers small and big. As brewers continue to merge or purchase their craft brethren (and competitors), brands and brewing histories may become diluted or lost. In the wake of the recent transitions of Anchor, Magic Hat, Old Dominion, and others, consumers are learning the painful truth that beer is a business and craft brewing is not some fun hobbyist project. Your favorite beer of today may become a fond memory tomorrow in someone else’s brand portfolio.

Growth also brings its own challenges and has already contributed to some serious identity crises in the industry. After years of predicting the event, the Boston Beer Company appears poised (if not already there) to exceed the magic two million barrel mark that the Brewers Association uses to define the size limits for craft brewers. While many recoil at the suggestion of disinviting Sam Adams from the craft beer party, the truth is that many craft brewers are far from small operations. How the industry defines itself, while caring for its pioneering elders will continue as a rolling boil.

Beyond trying to define “craft”, the industry’s success also challenges the consumer’s understanding of what the whole industry stands for. As growing pains set in, brewers find themselves stretched increasingly thin. Due to demand and quick sales, brewers send beer to markets thousands of miles from home, sometimes while their local patrons can’t find their favorites. To date, only a handful of brewers (craft or not) have chosen to brew their beers in distant breweries to satisfy new markets, but this trend will rise. But if Goose Island brews its Honker’s Ale or 312 in New Hampshire, is it really still Goose Island? Many consumers don’t think so.

Craft brewers also have to contend with the increasing interest of macro brewers in their profitable and growing market segment. As I predicted several years ago, Blue Moon has become the nation’s best selling craft/faux-craft beer. It’s a sales juggernaut that shows no signs of slowing, especially with MillerCoors’ creation of the new Tenth and Blake Beer Company spinoff. Expect the big guys to be more aggressive as they spend more time playing in the craft beer sandbox.

Finally, craft brewers need to get their own houses in order. In the very first issue of BeerAdvocate Magazine, I took craft brewers to task for refusing to put bottling or brewing dates on their packaging. While we have seen some progress in recent years, freshness dating continues to be a problem that many of the industry’s biggest players refuse to adequately address. While I personally love Bell’s Two Hearted Ale and included it in Great American Craft Beer, I shouldn’t have to go to the brewery’s website and enter a batch code to find out when it was made. A few stale bottles have caused me to rethink buying this longtime favorite and many others from craft brewers that should know better.

–Article appeared in Issue 48 of BeerAdvocate Magazine.

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The Beer King of the Interwebs: Harry Schuhmacher

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Born the son of a Lone Star distributor in Houston, Harry Schuhmacher was surrounded by beer from his earliest days. Derived from generations of beer distributors, Schuhmacher dutifully did his part, ringing plastic six-pack holders over cans, cleaning up bottle breakage, and driving a forklift at the disturbing yet enviable age of five. And things may have continued this way had his father not up and sold the beer distributorship.

In an almost soap operatic turn, the son went from the top of the glass pile to the dusty city streets, forced to make it on his own, with few marketable skills. Well, actually, Schuhmacher had plenty of skills, chief among them an insider’s knowledge of the beer industry. So fifteen years ago he made the fateful decision to start a daily email bulletin for the beer industry. “It was just when the Intertubes were getting popular, and I thought beer distributors and brewers needed a daily email covering the inside baseball stuff that they can’t get anywhere else — gossip, sales trends, who’s screwing whom — that sort of thing,” he says.

Far from a beer blogger, Schuhmacher runs a serious business dedicated to providing the beer industry with inside information and breaking news, a point reflected in his publication’s scorching $480 a year price tag. For the first decade, Schuhmacher focused much of his Beer Business Daily on the big brewers and distributors, but things have changed. He now dedicates half of his coverage to craft and regional breweries. “We’ve grown as the craft brewers have grown,” he says. “It has given me a renewal on my career, because covering the big guys exclusively was starting to be a drag.”

Schuhmacher has always treated the world of craft brewing with respect and interest, and perhaps a mild and understandable skepticism about its future. In his line of work, one so focused on the bigger brewers, such esteem wasn’t always a given. Just a few years earlier, one of Schuhmacher’s main competitors condescendingly wrote in the American Brewer of “the fantasy of the craft brewing revolution.” The competitor helpfully added, “Face facts folks: Wheat beer is not likely to be the next big thing!”

Fast forward a few years and a wheat ale is now the largest selling craft beer in the United States, a point often reflected in Schuhmacher’s redoubled efforts to cover the craft brewing scene.

A bit folksy at times and with a self-deprecating humor that disarms even his angriest big brewery targets, Schuhmacher is helping the industry at large take craft brewers more seriously, something we can all raise a pint to.

Disclosure: Having shared beers a few times and traveled together, I count Harry Schuhmacher as a friend.

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A Tale of Two Beer Festivals…

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As legend has it, homebrewing advocate Charlie Papazian and beer writer Michael Jackson gazed over the bounty of excellent beers on the floor of the Great British Beer Festival in the early 1980s and an idea struck Papazian. He turned to Jackson and remarked that he wanted to hold a similar festival back in the United States. Jackson nodded in understanding, and wryly retorted, “yes, but where will you get the beer?”

The first Great American Beer Festival, held in a small Boulder hotel ballroom in 1982, saw beers from around twenty breweries, whose numbers mainly included the few regional breweries still in existence, along with upstarts such as Sierra Nevada and Boulder Brewing. In the truest sense of, “if you build it, they will come,” a fast forward nearly three decades finds the GABF to have developed into the world’s largest beer festival, boasting 3,500 beers from 500 breweries.

The grand daddy of beer fests, the GBBF too remains strong and still sets an enviable example for other events. The GBBF at Earl’s Court is a curious place where servers pour beers by the pint, in actual, proper glasses, and where many attendees stand around engaged in conversation while slowly enjoying their ales. To be sure, the GBBF suffers from some of the same issues that plague other fests, but seemingly to a lesser extent. While people still cheer when a pint shatters on the cement floor, no one tries to smack the glass from your hands as with recent GABF’s. There is also something remarkably adult about the GBBF’s format, where the larger vessels counsel visitors to slow down and really get to know their beers. And with bottles available for take away—and often at prices better than what we get in the states—GABF veterans can be forgiven their astonishment.

But there are signs of change at the traditionalist GBBF as well. While the real ale booths remain well-attended, it’s the foreign bars, filled with American, Belgian, and German treats that truly pack in the crowds. Perhaps out of sheer novelty, the often unbelievable prices, or maybe as a palate bashing break from mellower British offerings, these beers remain in constant demand and disappear quickly. Starting with close to 100 casks and hundreds of bottles on the first day of the festival, which was mainly open to brewers and other members of the trade, nearly everything was ravaged by the end of day two. Plenty of thirsty, disappointed beer enthusiasts could be expected for the final two days of the event. Beyond the foreign bars, by far the most popular British beers at the fest had some sort of American connection. I watched the Colorado American IPA from Red Squirrel enveloped in a constant stream of pours until it kicked, all while dozens of other nearby traditional beers sat untouched. Similar scenes could be experienced across the hall with BrewDog’s Punk IPA. Where the IPA moniker once suggested stodgy, old beers your dad would drink, by the end of day two, attendees had killed every IPA at the fest, an incredible change of circumstances in only a few years.

To be sure, hundreds of brilliant, traditional milds, bitters, and porters dominated the beer engines and the awards presentations. All the excitement of the fest, however, centered on the less established offerings and suggested that the future of British beer might not rest in campaigns to return to perceived glory days of old but in the splendor and whimsy of brewing innovation. As brewers at the GABF continue to experiment and push the definitions of beer and the boundaries of the drinking public, it’ll be interesting to see what results in the tug of war between the American and British brewing models in another twenty-five years.

–Article appeared in Issue 43 of BeerAdvocate Magazine.

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