Category: BeerAdvocate Mag

The Blind Side…

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In the beer world, it’s often de rigueur to make fun of seemingly naïve, judgment averse wine snobs and their penchants for spending money based upon label consciousness rather than actual flavor and quality. We’ve all read about behavioral science experiments where wine drinkers are given two bottles of wine, both filled with the same liquid but with two different labels. After being told that one bottle is considerably more expensive than the other, study participants routinely prefer the pricier bottle. Similarly, The Wine Trials, a 2009 book from Fearless Critic, caused a stir in the wine industry by reporting its findings that participants, both experts and novices, preferred much less costly wines to more expensive offerings in scientific blind tastings. Grounds for a good chuckle at snooty wine’s expense, right?

Well, not so fast. Who’s to say the same dilemma doesn’t also plague the world of craft beer? While a follow-up book, called The Beer Trials, failed to account for such wide disconnect between price and quality—Budweiser and Celebrator ended up about where you’d expect them to be—beer is a difficult comparator to wine in terms of testing whether people prefer to drink more or less expensive products. As the authors note, the price differentials between the most expensive craft beers (with certain scarcity promoting outliers aside) and the average macro offering isn’t particularly significant, paling in comparison to the difference between a $15 and a $150 bottle of wine.

But does that mean beer drinkers are off the hook when it comes to bias in our tasting preferences? We do live in a world where fans of Miller Lite can sit elbow to elbow at a bar with another patron who is enjoying a $8 short pour chalice of a world classic Belgian dubbel. It’s hard to find a similar comparison in the wine world. But I keep coming back to the imperial stout ratings conundrum. A quick look at the Best of BeerAdvocate beer list reveals a few things. First, about half of the top 50 beers are imperial stouts, with the rest comprised of other big, boozy styles or funkified options. Second, dozens and dozens of styles fail to make the list, with an entire branch of beer—the lager family—completely shut out of the party.

And while many of the listed beers are indeed excellent, what accounts for the odd stylistic disparity? Are we a collective of booze hounds? Or is high alcohol dark beer simply the most popular choice at many bars? To be sure, some inevitable factors, such as scarcity, are at work. Standing on a Portsmouth street corner all night waiting for the local brewery to offer its specialty imperial stout for sale the next day better make the beer taste awesome. But perhaps something else is at work that we should consider.

In preparing my book, Great American Craft Beer, I participated in a lot of blind tastings, something with which I had only limited previous experience. After creating the initial list of selections for the project, I expected that particular beers would certainly make the final cut due to their reputations. To my surprise, many of these highly sought after beers failed to qualify. I think the same experience applies to many highly hyped beers, as buzz attracts crowds for particular products.

The take away is this: while beer is a social beverage that is meant to be enjoyed in good company, it helps to occasionally step back and inspect the foundations of our beer knowledge and beliefs. As a means of improving your tasting ability or just to spice up your parties, the occasional blind tasting may lead to a newfound respect for a big brewery’s hefe-weizen or an often overlooked German Pilsener.

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WWFD: What Would Fritz Do? (about the slow death of seasonal beer)…

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It’s in light-hearted moments with a beautiful, brimming pint in front of me that my thoughts turn to days when things were not nearly so cheerful for flavorful beer lovers. In those dark days, which largely passed before my legal drinking age, things were grim. With the tales of our beer elders ringing in my head, I picture a Orwellian world where brewers painted with only a single, bleak color, one in which a fizzy yellow monotony reigned until craft brewers, as in Apple’s classic 1984 parody ad, threw their mash rakes through the glass ceiling of low expectations.

In distinguishing themselves from mainstream, macro beers, early microbrewers tried all sorts of ideas. Some added extra hops to their beers, while others sought refuge in passive, ubiquitous ambers. According to beer lore at this point, one of the earliest craft brewers, Fritz Maytag, initiated the program of releasing specialty beers into the market at different times during the year. Starting with his super hoppy Anchor Liberty Ale in 1975, the grandfather of all American IPA’s to follow, and continuing with his paradigm shattering Our Special Ale, Maytag and the Anchor Brewing staff appreciated that consumers would be interested in experiencing a departure from their regularly scheduled beers. Like a restaurant changing its menu to reflect new seasonally appropriate fare, early craft brewers offered their own products designed to suit the seasons. With deep roots in European brewing history, the seasonal brewing practice was often the result of necessity, such as when brewers produced heartier beers to sustain themselves when brewing wasn’t possible or in honor of religious and political occasions.

As with the changing of leaves for Vermonters and the first snow fall for Minnesotans, beer enthusiasts often greet today’s seasonal beers as just another event in a calendar year. And while some of these beers spark quick flurries of excitement upon initial release, beer snobs spend more time lamenting perceived recipe changes from year to year than celebrating their good fortune in having such a rotating selection of diverse beers. Despite this attitude, seasonal beers remain one of the most potent tools in the craft brewer’s marketing arsenal. While other alcohol producers are stuck with constant, year-round products, ingenious craft brewers get to inject more enthusiasm into their customer bases every couple months. Beyond the beer geeks, the general public’s excitement over the release of Summer and Pumpkin beers isn’t something craft brewers should take for granted, especially as such sales now constitute the fastest growing segment of the craft beer marketplace.

Accordingly, brewers should take care not to slay the golden egg giving goose. As with the presidential campaigning cycle, the seasonal beer release calendar starts earlier and earlier every year. Where cooling Octoberfest beers once only appeared in early to mid September, we now start hearing about them amidst August’s summer heat and Summer beers seemingly appear out of nowhere in the rainy, dreary days of early April. As distributors and retailers clamor to get earlier access to these specialty releases, some of the magic of their seasonality starts to fade, like the appeal of a ski vacation in July. Just as brewers take care in the naming of their seasonal beers—try selling a Christmas Ale come New Year’s Day—they should also take care in respecting the role of the seasonal beer. And while many beer enthusiasts would love to get their hands on a malty Octoberfest in May, such ubiquity takes away from the special nature of these releases.

Craft brewers should always remember the role seasonal beers have played in expanding their customer bases and their bottom lines. For craft brewers tempted to focus their attention on high priced, limited edition beers that appeal to a tiny fraction of beer lovers, it’s telling that the original craft brewer, Anchor Brewing, has not embraced the high alcohol and hop bomb craze. These days, craft brewers might do well to inquire, WWFD: what would Fritz do?

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Respecting Malt…

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I have a vision of the future, one in which beer lovers stand arm in arm, glasses raised, like in that old Coca-Cola commercial. Except in my version, the pints raised are brim full of malty lager beer and not sugary soda. Alas, this global beverage utopia seems but a distant dream, not because the planet will not come to adopt craft beer as their preferred beverage, but because once transitioned, these craft converts will likely turn their backs on the lagers they once cradled.

Despite popular beer geek antipathy towards the big guys, the result of years of low-brown television ads and decades of ubiquitous, uninspired bottles of light, I believe the consumer disconnect over lager is more fundamental. It stems from a lack of understanding and appreciation of the beauty of malt.

As an illustration, quickly name three hop varieties. Now try and do the same for types of malted barley; a taller and perhaps insurmountable task for even the most passionate enthusiast. And when was the last time you heard a brewer brag about or advertise the types of malt used in his new beer?

While deep golden fields of gently flowing barley remain an enduring American symbol, having been enshrined in forms as diverse as America the Beautiful and countless mass-market beer commercials, their contribution to the final product remains elusive to most drinkers. This was not always the case. For a long period of global brewing history, brewers raised and dried their own barley. As the brewing business became more commercial, the malting process became more industrialized, offering brewers new cost savings over their resource intensive operations. In the modern era, very few breweries perform their own malting, beyond the occasional, makeshift roasting of malts for a specialty beer, such as a smoked porter. In treating malt as just another raw material for purchase in fifty pound bags or by the ton, blown into windowless silos, we’ve lost touch with the ingredient widely considered to provide the soul of beer.

An alarming number of self-professed craft beer fans dismiss these flavor-friendly beers as boring, pedestrian offerings only suited to novice, unrefined drinkers. As with such casual dismissals of all lager beers, Saint Arnold and Ninkasi shake their respective heads at such ironic beer bigotry. Often the focal point of less flavor obvious lager styles, malt centric beers celebrate and equally complex and sophisticated flavor palate. Whether used as a sweet and earthy backbone in otherwise crisp, hoppy German pilsners or as the center of attention in rich bocks and robust Scotch ales, malt brings more than sugar for alcohol conversion to the world’s best beers.

The subtle charms of different malt varieties bring balance and nuance in an extreme era where humulin overload is the popular trend. Whether bready, toasted, velvety, sweet, rich, or robust, different malt varieties can add deep layers of character that are too often underappreciated by many consumers. For their parts, brewers are sometimes too focused, whether through routine, price consciousness, or ease of habit, with using the same malts in nearly every beer they brew. Yet many manage to simultaneously navigate the complicated engineering and wrangling necessary to keep multiple yeast strains in-house. As one well-known brewer, often featured in these pages, told me, “Many brewers just do not understand malt?

As we enter the fall and winter, times of the year when great American malty beers enjoy their widest availability, take some time to give your patronage those brewers who celebrate the oft-neglected yang to hop’s yin. And maybe we can help the world learn to love malt again.

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The Time Has Come To Redefine Extreme Beer…

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The time has come for brewers and consumer beer advocates alike to redefine extreme. After spending years pushing the envelope of what constitutes beer, the movements of brewers have largely been directed down paths towards higher alcohol levels, increased hop ratios, and bourbon barrel aging, sometimes all at once. While hardcore beer geeks continue to salivate over each new such release, when tested blind, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between these one-note wonders. Take for the extreme beer movement’s ringleader, the Double IPA. The alcohol levels on most DIPA’s have run so high as to render them nearly indistinguishable from American barleywines and it is the rare that one actually tastes expressively of hops instead of booze.

It is time for this singularity of vision to give way and for a new era of extreme to dawn. Now this is not the biweekly call to abandon extreme beer for a return to traditional beer styles, although brewing a clean helles or crisp German pilsener is about the most radical act an American craft brewer could undertake these days. Instead, it is time to push past alcohol, hops, and boozy barrels as the only gauges of extreme. If extreme means to exceed the ordinary, usual, or expected, then sticking your latest booze bomb in a bourbon barrel, the training wheels of extreme beer, can no longer quality.

At the Extreme Beer Festival a few years back, surrounded by dozens of these usual alcohol, hop, and barrel suspects, I overheard a few folks talking about one beer that had gone too far. After ambling over to the mentioned table, for a local farm brewery, the brewer told me of his plan to turn extreme on its head. Rather than simply producing yet another barrel or booze beer, he decided to brew a Medieval ale. Starting four days before the festival, the brewer produced a 100-percent barley beer, with no hop or spice additions, and served it, as would have been done several hundred years earlier, within a few days. By his own admission, the beer, with no preservatives and a low alcohol level, had already started to turn, as beer quickly did in the early days of brewing. Now I’m not saying that we should return to pre-Industrial Age brewing conditions but it was a memorable beer moment, a rare opportunity to glimpse brewing history, and it was qualified as extreme.

In a time where brewers brag about using fifteen different hop and malt types in their beers, I am drawn away to thoughts of the beauty and simplicity inherent in many single malt and hop offerings. Muddlehop messes are full of sound and fury; signifying nothing, like a discordant cacophony of misaligned and malcontented flavors. It is more the noise of traffic than the mastered hand of Ornette Coleman in its self-promoted dissonance. Today, it is a far more radical thing to rely on a single hop variety to create crisp, clean, and iconic pilsners, as Victory Brewing has done with its Braumeister Pils series, or to create singularly expressive India pale ales.

The same can be said for brewers and their use of multiple yeast strains. Perhaps the least understood element of brewing, the complexities of yeast continue to confound American brewers to the extent that many prefer to work with the same, safe California or English ale yeast strains than truly plumb the depths of this mysterious ingredient. There remains so much unexplored ground in the classic four ingredients of beer that expanding into new areas, for its own sake and to the detriment of drinkability, is growing tired and extreme it can no longer be considered.

In changing the way we view extreme, or at least what we are willing to give that label, we can open our minds to new experiences and allow American beer, which has grown complacent with its reliance on the unholy trinity of alcohol, hops, and barrels, to start the next chapter in the story of extreme beer.

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The Case Against Carrying Every Craft Beer In Your Local Store…

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Craft beer enthusiasts around the United States know something exciting is happening. They trade emails and blaze Internet forum pages with news of their favorite, distant breweries coming to their home states. Local beer stores, from Tempe to Tampa, teem with attractive new brands. But behind the scenes, the craft brewing industry is at a difficult crossroads, anxiously trying to balance robust growth with pleasing consumers and distributors. And it’s only going to get harder.

The availability of a diverse range of great beers has long been standard fare in big market cities, such as Seattle, Chicago, and New York. But travel to some cities less well-recognized for better beer offerings and you’ll see something unexpected: the same brands you can find in Philadelphia, Boston, and Denver. And while it’s exciting for a beer lover to try beers from thousands of miles away, some craft brewers and distributors have concerns about the future.

In the beer business, growth is achieved in one of two ways, organically, where breweries expand sales within their current markets, or through geographic expansion into new markets. Organic growth is difficult. It involves battling in your core markets to gain new draft handles and shelf space. Breweries work with their distributors to fight on the front lines, selling their stories and educating retailers about the values of their products. While demanding, the resulting sales, if supported, provide a strong base for the brewer’s operations to grow. In comparison, geographic expansion is much easier. Five years ago, craft breweries had to fight for the attention of distributors. Today, brewers frequently receive unsolicited inquiries from wholesalers anxious to sign up new brands. So if a brewery wants to expand, it need only look to sending a few pallets of beer to a new state.

When distributors were giving craft brewers the cold shoulder, they dedicated themselves to the organic growth model. With the change in fortunes, breweries of all sizes are increasingly rejecting it. In early 2003, Colorado’s New Belgium Brewing Company sold beer in twelve states, focused on the western U.S. By the end of 2009, that number will hit twenty-five, including South Carolina. For a brewery of New Belgium’s size, selling around a half-million barrels per year, that model may make sense. But what about the neighboring Avery Brewing Company, which sells only 16,000 barrels in thirty-three states and parts of Europe? Or crazier yet, tiny producer The Bruery sending its less than 1000 barrels to eight states. Contrast these models to those of local breweries, such as Berkshire Brewing and Wachusett Brewing, which sell 20,000 barrels in three or four states, or better yet, New Glarus Brewing, which sells 80,000 barrels in just one state.

While craft beer fans love having new beers to try, the geographic expansion model has some built-in problems. For one, as with land in real estate, we’re not making more states. So expansion can only go so far before you start eyeing Canada or Belize. Second, after the initial surge of enthusiasm, consumers often find dusty bottles sitting neglected on store shelves far from the watchful eye of the distant, absent brewer. And consumers and distributors are off to snag the next great thing to come along. Finally, while sending pallets of beer to new markets is an easy way to grow, keeping that pipeline filled when you’re over-extended is proving difficult. Even larger craft brewers, such as Bell’s Brewery and Dogfish Head have had troubles keeping popular beers, such as Two Hearted IPA and 90 Minute IPA, available in many markets. Other smaller breweries, such as Sixpoint Craft Ales, have entered markets with an initial bang only to withdraw a few months later due to lack of product availability.

While there is perhaps no greater concern for a craft brewer than access to market, especially after years of tough battles with large, entrenched macro breweries and a distribution system built upon volume sales and slanted against smaller operations, the sudden wholesaler interest in their products and promises of quick sales should give weary brewers pause. And craft beer drinkers should give some long term thought to whether it’s a good thing have every craft beer available at our local stores.

–Article appeared in Issue 29 of BeerAdvocate magazine.

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