A good brewery museum is worth supporting

The Christian Science Monitor’s feature “5 famous pork projects: Beer museum and more” includes, as you might have guessed, funding for the National Brewery Museum in Potosi, Wis.

In 2004, The Potosi Brewery Complex restoration project received a $449,574 grant from the Federal Highway Administration’s National Scenic Byways Program to help renovate the building in order to attract tourism. Straddling the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, the renovated brewery became home to the National Brewery Museum, the Potosi Brewing Company Transportation Museum, a Great River Road Interpretive Center, and a micro brewery.

I don’t understand why this is a bad thing. As far as government projects go a half million dollars isn’t much. Efforts to create a national museum have failed elsewhere. Beyond the fact the museum houses rotating exhibits of items on loan from members of the American Breweriana Association there’s the Research Library. What could be more important?

A few photos from when we visited a couple of years ago:

Big breweries, small batches – been there, done that?

So MillerCoors has launched a separate company to manage its portfolio of (existential warning) craft beers and imports, calling it “Tenth and Blake Beer Company.”

Is this different than what America’s megabreweries breweries tried in the mid 1990s? On the surface, but maybe not that different. Will Tenth & Blake prove more successful? We’d be guessing, wouldn’t we? Before you do, consider a bit of history.

1995. “We are behind the curve, no question about it. We need to learn about specialty beer,” Scott Barnum, then general manager of Miller American Specialty Craft Beer Co., told All About Beer magazine. That’s the year that Miller bought a stake in the Celis Brewery and Shipyard Brewing. Leinenkugel and Miller Reserve were the other key brands in the ASCBC portfolio. “We have people in here helping us train our palates and our noses, working with our sensory development. We listen to guys tell us how they built their microbrewing businesses, about investment, capital. We talk to entrepreneurs. We are immersing ourselves in this world.”

Anheuser-Busch formed what it called the Specialty Group of Anheuser-Busch. “We are trying to think differently,” said Jeff Jones, who was senior product manager for the group. “That’s the whole thought process of the specialty beer business. I do have a passion for beer. We have to think differently from a large brewer, and that was the purpose for separating out our group.”

Coors established its own specialty group, Unibev, much earlier than the others, and in 1995 its star was Killian’s. The year before bock, Oktoberfest and wheat beers all flunked various trials. However, Unibev managing director Tex McCarthy said that a new brand, Blue Moon, wouldn’t carry the Coors name. “We want them to be disassociated from the Coors family. . . . If people see a major brewer’s name on a micro it loses some of the cachet that makes the beer interesting to begin with.”

You know the rest. It didn’t happen over night and it didn’t happen because Coors threw a bunch of advertising money behind the brand but Blue Moon Belgian White became the best selling wheat beer in America ever.

1997. Miller remained focused on working with regional partners rather than brewing specialty beers (the Reserve line had been axed by then). “We’ve said before that this is a regional business,” Barnum said. “More and more, you will see people contracting, narrowing their focus.”

That didn’t exactly work out. Miller ended up buying out Pierre Celis and his family and by 2000 had closed the Celis Brewery. Miller sold its stake in Shipyard back to Alan Pugsley and Fred Forsley and that company has thrived.

Forsley explained what happened a few years after he and Pugsley regained full control of their brewery: “I think initially the plan was well conceived, where Miller was focusing on portfolio selling. The whole Miller network was designed so their sales force could come in and sell their whole portfolio of beer. American Specialty Craft Beer had a relationship on the sales side with Molson, the imports, Asahi, and so on. That way a salesman was responsible not only for Shipyard but Molson. They had a variety of resources to pull from. When it changed from being a portfolio sale to a priority sale, as acknowledged by everybody in the organization, the goal became to make Miller’s main brands their focus. That really caused major problems for us. Up until then the sales efforts were working very well.”

A press release from MillerCoors indicates Tenth & Blake “will own the strategic business drivers — marketing, trade marketing and an independent sales organization dedicated to the craft and imports business.” That’s the something different. But it’s not all it takes.

“We didn’t really fit into the Coors distribution system until about five years ago,” Keith Villa, who wrote the recipe for Blue Moon White, said last year when I visited Coors while doing the research for Brewing with Wheat. A sales force is not what made that beer. Many readers here feel obliged to beat up on Blue Moon White, and yes it has became hip, a badge even. But Villa put a beer in the glass that drinkers who are willing to pay more want to drink.

Fifteen years, and more, after the people working at the nation’s largest breweries said they were ready to think like smaller breweries how many successes similar to Blue Moon can you point to? Maybe it’s not a matter of training. Maybe it’s company DNA.

Setting a few brewery numbers straight

A couple of times recently I’ve read stories — or, yikes, tweets — that mentioned how many brewing companies remained in operation in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, then reported the current number of breweries. That’s not exactly apples to apples. Many brewing concerns operate multiple breweries, and the proper comparison would be breweries to breweries and concerns to concerns.

So, for the record, here are a few useful numbers to remember.

The boom years for breweries
(From History of the Brewing Industry and Brewing Science in America, by John P. Arnold and Frank Penman)

Year      Breweries      Barrels produced
1867         3,440         6,207,402
1868         3,756         6,146,663
1869         3,203         6,342,055
1870         3,286         6,574,617
1871         3,147    7,740,260
1872         3,475         8,659,427
1873         4,131         9,633,323
1874         3,282         9,600,879
1875         2,783         9,452,697
1876         3,293         9,902,352
1877         2,758         9,810,060
1878         2,830         10,241,471

The number of breweries never reached the 1878 level again, drifting below 2,000 by 1892 and to 1,092 in 1918, the year before Prohibition began. However, overall production went straight up , to 20,710,933 in 1886, to 30,487,209 five years later, passing 40 million barrels in 1901, 54 million in 1906 and 63 million by 1911.

Many of those breweries operating in 1878 were quite small. BEER, Its History And Its Economic Value As A National Beverage, by F.W. Salem, provides a complete list of production numbers for 1878 and 1879. Thus we can see that G. P. Pfannebecker in Paterson, N.J., brewed 48 barrels in 1878 and 152 in 1879. The biggest dozen breweries in 1879 where:

George Ehret (New York)     180,152 barrels
Philip Best ( Milwaukee)     167,974
Bergner & Engel (Philadelphia)     124,860
Joseph Schlitz (Milwaukee)     110,832
Conrad Seipp (Chicago)     108,347
P. Ballantine & Sons (Newark)     106,091
Jacob Ruppert (New York)     105,713
Christian Morlein (Cincinnati)     93,337
H. Clausen & Son (New York)     89,992
William J. Lemp (St. Louis)     88,714
Flanagan & Wallace (New York)     84,825
Anheuser-Busch (St. Louis)     83,160

Before the renaissance
(From American Breweries II by Dale P. Van Wieren)

1983 – 51 brewing concerns operate 80 breweries. This is the low water mark for number of breweries.
1984 – 44 brewing concerns operate 83 breweries.

19th century startup
(As long as I’m digging through history books, some facts from 100 Years of Brewing, published in 1903)

More than 100 years before Sierra Nevada launched in California, Adolphus Busch bought an interest in a St. Louis brewery owned by Eberhard Anheuser. A brewery had been operating at the same location for 15 years, yet in 1865 sold a modest 8,000 barrels. By the time the name was changed to Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association in 1875 annual production has risen to 34,797.

In the next 10 years production increased by 10%, 48%, 32%, 41%, 34%, 42%, 22%, 22%, and 5% before falling 1% to reach 318,085 barrels. Sixteen years later sales passed 1 million for the first time.

That year, 1901, the plant covered about 60 acres and as well as a brewhouse that could produce 6,000 barrels a day, it had ice plants with 650 tons daily capacity, malt houses with 4,500 bushels daily capacity, a cooling capacity of 2,650 tons per day, storage elevators for malt and barley of 1.25 million bushels capacity, stock houses for lagering purposes of 400,000 barrels capacity, and a power plant with 60,000 square feet of heating surface (equal to 7,750 horse power).

Wine and jazz? I’ll take beer and blues

Brother Thelonious Ale from North Coast BrewingOr beer and roots music.

Or beer and alt.country (“whatever that is,” at the late, great No Depression magazine said on its cove).

Truth is we like wine in our family. We like all manner of jazz. Still I was surprised to see Wine and Jazz magazine today at the book store. Turns out it has been around a couple of years, and the tagline says, “Celebrating the Perfect Lifestyle Combination.”

Right.

At the risk of turning this beer and wine category into beer versus wine I do have to point out they feature “blogologists” rather than bloggers. Rest assured, if I ever start Craft Beer & Alt.Country magazine (the tagline would be “An existential debate with every sip or every chord”) we’ll employ bloggers.

One final thought. Thank goodness that North Coast Brewing has staked out Thelonious Monk for all of us.

Bent (but not Broken) Nail IPA

So the story behind the taster tray and the Bent Nail IPA at Red Lodge Ales in the Montana town of the same name is the same.

The beer was named as a tribute to the construction workers who were among the brewery’s first customers. “They said it (the beer) made for a lot of bent nails,” a bartender explained. It’s a solid beer, nicely balanced, worthy of the bronze medal it won at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival (as an American-style Strong Pale Ale).

The handle for the taster tray features the same bent nail. Easy to carry and nicely decorated. Customers use the green sheet, on the left, to order, writing numbers next to the beer name on the laminated menu with a grease pencil. Very efficient.

Broken Nail Double IPA was not available when we visited. My nephew, whose wedding we headed north to attend, assures me it’s worth returning for. We must may.