Category: Craft Beer

Reflections on Beer in Chicago…

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After ten days in Chicago, I have to admit that the first thought on my mind is that I hope I don’t come across another stout or porter before Spring. I don’t usually gravitate towards any one particular style of beer but my sub-conscious buying choices led me to have a fridge full of roasty, dark beers. Now this was no explosion of beer geekery. With the exception of the Bourbon Barrel Aged Imperial Stout from America’s Brewing Company in Aurora, all of my stouts were standard session fare, be they oatmeal, dry Irish, or coffee-infused. I believe I had at least three different stouts from Dark Horse in Michigan. And commensurate with its name, this brewery really came out of nowhere to be a real hit this trip. The tasty Scotty Karate scotch ale was available at several local bars and each of the offerings, including the Perkulator coffee doppelbock (which I expected to hate) was top-notch. I’m beginning to think that Michigan may be the world’s capital of quality stouts and I look forward to visiting the state this summer or fall.

The holiday beer drinking experience was an especially difficult transition for me as I’ve recently experienced an unparalleled period of beer brand monogamy. During my recent trip to Philadelphia, I became enchanted with a particularly sharp and attractive little number. With golden waves and floral hints, this one knocked me over right away. From the first sip, I was enamored with the Pikeland Pils from Sly Fox. Better yet, the beer comes in a handy suitcase of cans that is easily transported and stacked in the fridge. I almost shed a tear when I finished my last can before leaving for Chicago. Happily, on my return, I was reunited with my new found friend and she brought along a companion, a case of Dunkel Lager cans from Sly Fox. I look forward to sampling this potent one-two hop malt punch for the next month or two before I have to start bugging friends to smuggle cases back for me.

While back in Chicago, I was once again reacquainted with how great a drinking city it is. We spent part of Christmas Eve at the recently reopened Berghoff Restaurant and Goose Island’s recently saved Clybourn pub, as well as pints at Delilah’s, the Hop Leaf, Map Room, Piece, Sheffield’s, and a half-dozen other great places. With the addition of a new package brewery, a soon-to-be opened new brewpub, and the emergence of strong nearby contenders and several new beer bars, such as the Local Option, I may have to revise my most recent BeerAdvocate column (recently posted here) as Chicago is making a run for the title of America’s best beer drinking city. And while I was very pleased to find Bell’s back in the area, I still longed for some Two Hearted, which was nowhere to be found. I was also disappointed that Summit was completely absent from everywhere I went (from bar to pub and grocery store to package store) and surprised that Summit’s twin city sibling, Surly Brewing, was nearly everywhere. I was also disappointed that the city’s global warming nose thumbing weather caused me to cancel a meeting I had at Miller’s pilot brewery in Milwaukee. I hope to reschedule a visit during a return trip to Wisconsin this June.

While shopping in local package stores and perusing tap handles throughout the city, I was amazed at how national the beer industry has become. The selection at Binny’s, Sam’s, or the Hop Leaf in Chicago looks like the selection at Downtown Wine and Spirits in Somerville, MA or the Foodery in Philadelphia and area bars. While we have several more years before nationalization really becomes an issue, I’m curious to see how breweries achieve growth and sales increases when they run out of new markets to conquer. My financial advice for the several business industry analysts who have been trying to contact me lately: Bet the farm on breweries in the 10,000 to 50,000 barrel range that are in fewer than five to seven states.

I’m looking forward to heading back to Chicago this June for a further review of local places, including Lunar Brewing on the city’s west side and the new Metropolitan Brewing Company.

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Co-opting Craft, Miller Style…

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As we head into December, people in the beer industry start to wonder how their respective channels performed during the year. Overall, it appears that craft beer has weathered the economic downturn pretty well, albeit with an expected decrease in sales compared to recent year juggernauts. While increased sales and volume are two important ways of measuring the craft beer industry’s performance, they are not the only measuring sticks. How the craft beer industry’s competitors have responded to its performance is another way to judge how well it is doing.

Take for instance the recently unveiled website for MillerCoors, the joint venture between the American brewing divisions of SABMiller and Molson Coors. After getting through its buggy age verification system (took me four tries over a three week period to finally gain entrance), I perused the Our Beers section, which breaks down the company’s brands into four curious categories. The first category, Domestic, is pretty self-explanatory. The second, Import, is a little more unusual and a sign of how global the brewing industry has become and how involved these two powerhouse corporations have become. The final two categories caught my attention. Under the heading of Craft, the website promotes the Blue Moon, Henry Weinhard’s, and Leinenkugel’s line of beers. The final catchall category, titled Specialty, includes other brands such as Killian’s Irish Red, Fosters, and the recently departed Zima.

The website doesn’t detail the distinctions to be drawn between the final three categories and they remain a bit of a curiosity. I’m not at all clear of how the company defines ‘craft’ or ‘specialty’, why Killian’s qualifies as a specialty brand while Blue Moon is a craft, and why Fosters isn’t an import. I could make some educated guesses on these points (Killian’s was once an Irish brand purchased and long-produced by Coors in the United States, while Blue Moon was created by Coors and Foster’s is brewed in Canada and brought into the United States as opposed to being brewed outside of North America).

I’m also not sure how I feel about the brazen use of the word ‘craft’ to promote its products. While this attempt at co-opting the cool of craft is no new trick, the Big Two have given up on any pretense of trying to muscle in on the success of craft beer. This is a bit ironic considering the underwhelming public response to Budweiser American Ale and to the suspended Miller Lite Brewers Collection a line of “craft-style” beers.

With that said, these beers continue to do well at the Great American Beer Festival and excluding their numbers from consideration considerably undersells the growing popularity of craft beer, better beer, or however you want to define the consumptive phenomenon.

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The Changing Face of the Craft Beer Industry…

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In the early 1980s, American craft beer pioneers dreamt of nothing more than producing a few beers that broke through the monotony of humdrum, mainstream lagers. A group of men and women who had traveled through Europe and had their eyes and mouths opened by local beers or who had adventured to brew their own beers. For these early entrepreneurs, the future was uncertain but filled with hopes of building a few hundred or even thousand barrel brewery.

Fast forward two decades and things have changed beyond anyone’s greatest expectations. Once top of the pops, America’s largest breweries are now reeling on their back heels. Once considered little more than a gimmick, craft beer has enjoyed startling success.

As the beer industry has aged, it has both matured and evolved. From its slow infancy to its turbulent teens, craft brewers are now experiencing the complications of adulthood. What started as a fun experiment for some has led to some pretty high stakes. From hobbyist basement systems costing a few hundred or thousand dollars to gleaming new brewhouses costing a few hundred thousand, the craft beer business is hardly just fun and games.

Times are changing quickly in the American beer marketplace and they’re not going to slow down anytime soon. In response to double-digit growth, breweries recently producing 10-15,000 barrels per year suddenly produce 75,000 barrels per year and have tank space capacity for many times more. To meet market expectations and changes, these brewers have traded sore backs for aching pocketbooks.

We are thankful that times are good right now and that despite a weak economy and financial hardships, craft brewers are not yet seeing a reversion to old buying habits.
But the nature of the industry itself is also changing in other ways. Many craft beer pioneers are now elder industry statesmen. Fritz Maytag bought Anchor Brewing 43 years ago; Ken Grossman started Sierra Nevada 28 years ago; Jim Koch toted his briefcase from bar to bar 24 years ago. Beyond these well-known figures, many founders of regional breweries have been in the business for 20 years or more now. And as with any other small business, many are owned by one person or a small group of aging entrepreneurs who’ve long been toiling in the brewhouse, glad-handing distributors, and hawking product every weekend at beer festivals. For these hard working individuals, vacations are few and downtime almost non-existent.

And as with any other hard driving profession, it eventually wears you down. With high debt levels and decades dedicated to building up their companies and employees, these brewery owners can’t just walk away. Not to the mention the disappointment felt by their loyal customers who they’ve worked so hard to gain. And so we must look to an uncertain future but one where we can be certain of corporate shakeups and where change will be a constant.

The Old Dominion Brewing Company of Ashburn, Virginia, for example, is representative of stories we will continue to hear. Founded by Jerry Bailey and other investors in 1989, the brewery was a pioneer in the Mid-Atlantic region. After nearly two decades of work, however, Bailey and others were ready to leave the business. They tried for years to sell to other craft brewery owners, but with no success. Then in 2007, they sold Old Dominion to a joint partnership of the Fordham Brewing Company and Anheuser-Busch. After making a run at it for a year, the group recently announced it will close the brewery’s pub and its future operations as a stand-alone brewery remain in question.

The Old Dominion case, while extreme, is a cautionary tale for the industry and consumers alike. Craft breweries are run by people not corporations and these folks can’t continue in this tough business forever. Shareholders eventually want their initial investments back, owners want to retire, and if they don’t have kids ready to take over the business, end game options remain limited. Consolidation, either with other craft breweries or with larger brewing concerns, will be the norm not the exception. And while we can all appreciate how far craft beer has come since its early days, it’s time to contemplate the business realities that lie ahead.

–Article appeared in Volume II, Issue IX of BeerAdvocate Magazine.

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Is Philadelphia Really A Great Beer City? We’ll Soon See…

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So we’re headed to Philadelphia and its northwestern suburbs for a family event next week and weekend, which, of course, I plan to turn into a beer trip. I first became conscious of Philadephia’s craft beer scene when I sampled my first and favorite beer from the town: Independence Brewing Company’s Franklinfest. A malty, toasted Octoberfest style beer, I can still remember how it tasted and how much I enjoyed it. Sadly, Independence didn’t make it but my interest in the town remained.

I first visited Philadelphia for beer a decade or so ago on a circuitous beer tour from Chicago to Wilmington, North Carolina. After enjoying time in Pittsburgh, at Stoudt’s and central Pennsylvania, we made our way through Victory and into Philadelphia proper. Pre-Beerfly days, we only had a well-worn copy of the excellent Beer Lover’s Guide to the United States to guide us. And after an aborted attempt to visit the Northeast Taproom in Reading (Stan and Daria’s guide was excellent but in the days before cellphones, books couldn’t tell you when a place decided to close on Mondays), we spent a fun night in the city. After visiting the well-known places, including Monk’s, we took a book recommendation and headed to McGillin’s. At the city’s oldest bar, we ran into the owners of Flying Fish (who gave my brother handwritten directions to his version of the area’s best bars) and a little known guy trying to give away t-shirts and pint glasses to people who would try his brown ale. Despite his efforts, the guy didn’t get much attention that night, much to our surprise as beer lovers. For that guy was Sam Calagione, founder of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. We sat down and chatted with Sam for a little while and I still have a snifter the bar gave away for buying one of his beers.

Several years later, after returning from my first trip to Bamberg, Germany, I foolishly opined on some Internet beer group that I didn’t believe Philadelphia to be a great beer town. I was heavily criticized at the time and have spent recent years considering the city’s place in the pantheon of great beer cities of the world. In recent months, I’ve had the opportunity to visit the few great American beer cities I had managed not to hit, including Seattle and Portland, Oregon. While I plan to do a future BeerAdvocate column on the subject of great beer cities and whether designating such a pursuit actually matters, my upcoming trip has returned my focus to Philadelphia.

I have to admit to a certain amount of excitement on my part at getting a chance, after a few years away, to return to Philadelphia. But in reviewing the usual online sites, including the excellent Beermapping.com, I still wonder at the pronouncements of fellow beer writers Don Russell, Lew Bryson, Jack Curtin, and a number of other locals that Philadelphia is “America’s Best Beer Drinking City.� I’ve previously laid out here and in my book my criteria for a great beer city and Philly definitely meets several of those marks, with a handful of top-notch beer bars (Monk’s, Tria, Eulogy) that heavily focus on educating the public. And as I haven’t been there in a while, I’m looking forward to seeing how well craft beer has integrated into regular drinking establishments in the city. But when it comes to breweries and brewpubs, I think this is where I have some pause about claims of Philly’s greatness. For brewpubs, the city offers Nodding Head, Manayunk, and Triumph Brewing. I’ve been to Nodding Head several times and enjoy its quirky environment and solid beers, but have not had a chance to visit Manayunk and relative newcomer Triumph. But that is it for the city, three brewpubs, although I plan to stop by Tom Baker’s new enterprise in Germantown and expect that will add greatly to the city’s brewpub balance. In looking at local breweries, we see even less to support Philly’s claims of greatness. Dock Street is celebrating its one-year anniversary at its new location and has a history almost as twisted as the Concord Brewery’s story. Yard’s Brewing has also had a up and down history and its story continues to unfold. I know very little of the Philadelphia Brewing Company and look forward to trying its beers but doubt it would be touted as a ‘great’ place. In terms of locally produced beer, Philadelphia doesn’t appear to have much of a grasp on the greatest title.

With this said, I’m still excited about visiting and drinking in Philadelphia because it actually reminds me of the best drinking city this country has to offer: Chicago. My home town may not be able to lay claim to being the greatest beer drinking city, although I think it could put up a fight, the character and quantity of its drinking establishments, in my opinion, is unmatched anywhere in America. My visits to Philadelphia and its drinking establishments, as well as reviewing descriptions of other Philly beer bars, reminds me so much of Chicago. I’ve never been to several of the city’s best drinking establishments (at least as they are described online), including The Grey Lodge and the Standard Tap, but I am expecting to thoroughly enjoy them. But I wonder whether a handful of great bars can be enough to raise Philly to the top echelon of great beer drinking cities in America.

When local guys such as Don, Lew, and Jack tout Philly’s beer drinking prowess, I get the sense that their definition of ‘Philadelphia’ is probably a lot broader than mine. I expect that they include places like Victory (35 miles west), the Sly Fox and Iron Hill establishments (15-20 miles outside), Flying Fish (15 miles east in New Jersey), and other outlying establishments. With all that the northwestern suburbs of Philly have to offer, I’m not going to argue with designating Eastern Pennsylvania as a classic and great beer region. And I’ll be stationed in this area and will be visiting the Earth Bread + Brewery, Victory, and probably the General Lafayette Inn, as well as a few other places (with any luck, the Drafting Room in Exton). But as to the city itself, I have my doubts.

In any event, local beer lovers clearly have a lot to brag about in Philadelphia and its outlying areas. And we cannot overlook the achievement that is the Philly Beer Week project, one I plan to attend this year. I’m looking forward to the trip and to putting the Philly propaganda line to the test.

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The Myth of Handcrafting…

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When it comes to craft beer, perhaps no word is tossed around as casually and as often as ‘handcrafted.’ From the earliest days of better beer to the present, craft breweries big and small have loved to up the romance of their brands with allusions to the by hand nature of the brewing process. The reference conjures up images of a keen eyed, lone brewer stirring a heavy mash rake over a smoldering copper cauldron of boiling brew. At just the right moment, the master craftsman brewer carefully and delicately adds a pinch of hops. The brewer in these fairy tales is part artisan, part custodian who gently ushers his product through the brewing process.

The colorful fable lasts for many consumers until they take their first brewery tour. The lands of hop pixies and malt elves are quickly replaced with snaking hoses, puddles of water, gurgling buckets of foamy particulates, and the occasional stench of caustic in the air. The notion of handcrafting is also quickly challenged. While American brewers in the earliest days of the craft brewing renaissance may have fit the cheerful description above romantic, today the brewing process is more akin to an industrial factory or sometimes even a computer programming suite.

It’s time that brewers and consumers let go of their dated, fanciful notions of the brewing process. When applied to model ship building, pottery making, or log cabin construction, the phrase handcrafted seems apt. When referencing the modern production of beer, handcrafted seems an overly romanticized and even misleading descriptor, even when applied to America’s smaller breweries. In the classic European sense, a handcrafted brewery was one where every part of the brewing process was indeed managed by hand. Brewers lugged heavy, dusty bags of malted barley to their mash tuns and dumped them in, only to shovel out by hand the spent grain after a few hot hours stirring the mash. Without the benefits of fork lifts and other systems, brewers then filled and rolled wooden barrels, which they sometimes made themselves, around the brewery and to horse-drawn carts for delivery to local pubs.

Let’s keep one thing straight, those romantic good old days sucked for the brewer. Brewing under those conditions was backbreaking and dangerous work and it did few favors for the beer. As craft breweries grow from mini-micros to small regional players to large national operations, their systems should match their improved business practices. Automation is a friend to both consumers and brewers. While part of the romance may be lost when breweries transition to all stainless steel breweries run by computers, you can rest assured that stable temperature controls and accurate brewing and fermentation conditions will improve the quality of the pint in front of you. That a brewer lugging fifty pound bags of grain has been replaced by a computer nerd watching the sparge represented in animation on a glowing screen is a positive thing for everyone involved.

At its best, brewing is part art and part science. Where the calculus lies between the two is the true beauty of beer and it’s where the magic lies for consumers and brewers alike. But make no mistake; brewing is both science and industry. Without these two components, art simply cannot produce consistent, clean, and consumable pints.

And for those consumers who refuse to let go of the romanticized notions of handcrafted brewing, there will always be a seat at your local brewpub. And when you see your local brewer hauling heavy grain bags and toiling in tough, challenging conditions, feel free to offer a hand. Then you’ll know what handcrafted really feels like.

–Article appeared in Volume II, Issue VII of BeerAdvocate Magazine.

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