musing

SABMiller, Lost Abbey ’round table’

Tomme ArthurIf you haven’t already read Fortune magazine’s interview with SABMiller CEO Graham Mackay then you don’t have to hurry over to the CNN Money site to do so, because …

Only on the Internet could you have the brewer from Lost Abbey Brewing and the CEO of the world’s second largest brewer in a round table discussion (OK, with two guys maybe the table isn’t round). And only when Tomme Arthur (Lost Abbey) is blogging. (He, not Mackay, is the one pictured here.)

Arthur has taken the interview and added his own comments along with Mackay’s. For example:

How would you characterize the company’s fiscal year just ended?

The SAB Miller Answer- The year gone by has been very successful. Latin America was amongst the strongest regions of growth, but Europe was as impressive. And we also had very strong volume growth in Asia, so our performance all around is strong.

Tomme Responds- Well, we’re still in business after our first year. I think that’s pretty kick ass. We made a bunch of new beers and we didn’t kill anybody. As for Latin America, it was our weakest region but Europe was awesome.

How do you think this would have gone had Matthew Boyle (the Fortune writer who did the interview) had started with Arthur and invited MacKay to elaborate in MacKay’s blog? Oh, wait, he doesn’t have one.

Pucker up for the Great American Beer Festival

Beer judgeThe Great American Beer Festival has added two more categories – actually one category and one sub-category – for sour beers in the 2007 competition.

American-Style Sour Ales will compete with German-Style Sour Ale (Berliner Weisse) in Category 13. Wood- and Barrel-Aged Sour Beer (Category 16) “is aged with the intention of imparting the particularly unique character of the wood, the micro flora present in the wood and/or what has previously been in the barrel.”

Would you call that beer terroir?

Changes and additions for the competition at listed at the GABF website (scroll down to “Letter from the Competition Director”). They include both “small” and “big” beers. A category was added for Other Low Strength Ale or Lager, basically balancing Other Strong Ale or Lager. And the Imperial Stout category now includes a sub-category for American-style Imperial Stout.

Director Chris Swersey’s letter detailing the changes is interesting for another reason.

As long as I’ve been going to the GABF (only 14 years) there’s always been sniping about brewers making special batches for the competition, with added pop (more alcohol, more hops) to stand out in the blind judging. That’s the background. Here’s the message.

During the past four years, the style descriptions for the American-style pale ale family of beer styles have evolved to the point that the essential differences reflect alcoholic strength more than any other single quality. We have received numerous comments from brewers, judges, and consumers, which indicate that there is confusion regarding the alcoholic strength of beers entered in particular categories, with respect to the brand name of the beers themselves. For example, a brewery could intentionally under-enter a strong pale ale in the pale ale category, with the idea that the beer might outclass the competition.

The GABF has no intention of policing entries for compliance by alcoholic strength. Analyzing entries is impractical and expensive, and more importantly, this role would subvert the function of the judge panel. Over the years, the judge panel has told us what makes great beer, and we plan to continue to let them. With this in mind, the judge orientation this year will include a taste calibration session that focuses on alcoholic strength, along with a reiteration of the comments that we have received regarding alcoholic strength. Please be sure to enter your beers in the appropriate category based on alcoholic strength as well as other factors.

That pretty much speaks for itself.

10 years of Falling Rock

Chris BlackDon Younger is going to stop by. Will you?

Granted, Younger – the venerable Portland, Oregon, publican who founded the Horse Brass Pub in 1976 – has his own stool at Falling Rock Tap House in Denver, but he seldom uses it in June.

He’ll be in Denver this week because Falling Rock celebrates its 10th anniversary.

The circumstances will be grander than when the multi-tap (69-75 tap handles operating, depending on the day, and “No Crap on Tap”) opened June 9, 1997. Chris Black (above), one of three founding brothers, didn’t realize that many of the distributors would deliver beer warm, so the bar was open for about four hours that day, then closed to organize and cool beer for the next day.

Black has different special beers planned for each days the celebration, and Belvedere Belgian Chocolate Shop is creating different chocolates to go with each beer. The first 50 customers each evening get a bar with a label that list the participating brewery as well as how many days the Falling Rock has been open.

Chris BlackThe beers are all locally brewed, and Black helped in production of several. For instance, Saturday he’ll be pouring a batch of La Foile he helped blend. New Belgium Brewing typically uses beer from two or three of its 10 foders (four 60- and six 130-hectoliter wood tuns) for a La Foile release. Black sat down with Eric Salazar of New Belgium to taste samples from all 10 tuns, and together they came up with a special batch.

The party kicks off the day before with Mr. Hoppy, made by Twisted Pine Brewing in Boulder. Gordon Knight founded Twisted Pine, where he brewed on New Belgium’s original five-hectoliter brewhouse. He later sold the company, but eventually was reunited with the brewing system when he started the Wolf Tongue Brewery in Nederland. That’s where he created Mr. Hoppy, a beer that Jim Parker (then the Wolf Tongue GM) called “hop water.”

There are a lot of reasons to post this at Appellation Beer (as opposed to Beer Travelers), but the best might be to remember Knight. He epitomized what I want to write about.

Knight was a Nebraska native who earned a Purple Heart as an Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He moved to Boulder in 1988, and soon turned from homebrewing to professional brewing. He also worked as a professional helicopter pilot, most often in fire fighting. He died in 2002 when his helicopter crashed while he was fighting a fire near Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Reflecting on Knight’s life, brewer Brian Lutz said: “Gordon didn’t have jobs, Gordon had passions. Gordon’s job was his passion and visa versa. That’s a good way to live and I thank him for challenging me to do the same.”

Let’s hope a few Coloradoans with good memories raise a glass of Mr. Hoppy in his memory on Friday.

Just a few of the others beers:

– Great Divide’s Hades (strong, golden and Belgian) makes its official debut on Sunday.
– Black Triple 6’s from Wynkoop on June 12. This is a variation on a beer brewed 6/6/06 by Wynkoop, which Chris helped make this time. Brewed in the manner of a Belgian tripel but with coffee in the recipe.
– Chris brewed a batch of Odell Double IPA with Doug Odell on the brewery’s five-barrel pilot system for June 15. The recipe includes a new high alpha (18.8 AA) hop called Apollo.
– June 16, Avery Salvation (a Belgian strong golden) aged since September in Eagle Rare Bourbon barrels.

The celebration runs through June 17. Then we can start resting up for the 20th anniversary of San Francisco’s Toronado in August.

How do you overlook 100 million cases of beer?

Better image for beerHere’s a multiple choice question:

a) Beer is an industrial product.
b) Beer is an artisanal product.
c) Wine is a pastoral/agricultural product.
d) Wine is an industrial product.

Which if these choices do you think Field Maloney chose in a story that appeared the web magazine Slate? I’ll give you a hint. The headline read: Beer in the Headlights. Sales are flat. Wine is ascendant. How did this happen?

He wrote about a) and c). We know – and I’m pretty sure he does, too – that the correct answer is “all of the above.”

I’m hoping that Jay Brooks gets around to a complete critique of this story (looks like he did), because a beer guy can find a lot to object to – whether it is the way that he uses a genuine beer expert like Lew Bryson to add beer cred or the less-than-accurate description of how beer is made.

(Or the fact that he writes “A Google search of beer and passion yields 1.48 million entries, while wine and passion yields four times that.” When I did that a minute ago the numbers were 1.7 million and 2 million.)

Much of what Mr. Maloney writes is correct. The largest American breweries have an image problem, although projects like Anheuser-Busch’s Here’s to Beer may be helping. Connoisseurship, passion and lifestyle are increasingly important.

However, I’m not buying into the wine/hand-crafted and beer/industrial premise. Consider these facts:

– Two Buck Chuck, called Charles Shaw wines in better company but still selling for $1.99 in California and a bit more elsewhere, last year accounted for 5 million cases of sales in 274 Trader Joe’s across the country. In California, wine heaven, eight out of 100 bottles of all wine sold are Two Buck Chuck. So growth hasn’t been fueled only by the “fine-wine industry.”

– The ascendance of fine wine and fine dining is generally linked to Northern California in the 1970s. That’s when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley and vintners from Napa and Sonoma scored their victories in the “Judgment of Paris.” It’s ALSO when Fritz Maytag modernized Anchor Brewing, effectively making it the first American microbrewery. Soon Jack McAuliffe founded New Albion Brewing, then Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi started Sierra Nevada, and we were off and running.

Last year the breweries we call craft produced comparable to 100 million cases – all less generic than Two Buck Chuck.

Hey, Slate, how did this happen?

Flying Dog plans ‘open source’ beer

Beer Open Source ProjectFlying Dog Ales – which has more happening on the Internet than any other brewery I know of – has launched its own Open Source Beer Project.

The idea is to allow beer drinkers and homebrewers to create or recommend modifications to a Flying Dog recipe.

The Open Source Beer Project will start as a Dopplebock but the style may evolve as participants offer ideas and tweak the recipe. “We are encouraging input on every part of the recipe, down to how what variety of hops we should use, how much we should use and when we should add them,” said Flying Dog Head Brewer, Matt Brophy.

The open source beer will be Flying Dog’s latest “Wild Dog” release and hit stores in October.

Kudos to Flying Dog for creating an RSS Feed for the project. The brewery has embraced the Internet. Just a few examples:

– It regularly updates its website, and sends out frequent e-mails for contests like a Ralph Steadman Signed Gonzo Bottle drawing.

– It has more friends (8,607 at this moment) than any other craft brewery in/on MySpace.

– It has a Squidoo page.

– The brewery continues to add new videos at YouTube.

Is this marketing? Yes. Should be be wary of marketing? Probably, but a thread runs through the way Flying Dog appears in each of these spaces. The videos are of actual employees – like president/”lead dog” Eric Warner and his truck.

If these aren’t real people behind real beer then it is a heck of an act.