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Making economics interesting: Beer in the wine aisle

By on March 19, 2013 in Beer & Wine

I’ve steered clear of the recent “wine-ification” of beer kerfuffle because I don’t have anything to say I haven’t already (New Beer Rule #7: Beer is not the new wine was written back in December of 2007, thus predating about half the breweries in the United States).

But today Mike Veseth, who I’ve mentioned here many times (including about his fine book, Wine Wars, and that he has another, Extreme Wine, on the way) asks the question: Is Craft Beer the Next Big Thing in Wine?

Remember the context and that the discussion revolves around economics. And it pretty much starts with an answer to the question he asks in the headline.

(Yes) — if you are thinking about things in terms of market spaces. The wine market space and that of craft beer are increasingly overlapping as craft beers infringe on wine’s turf (and low alcohol wines threaten to do the same for beer). And if the common battlefield isn’t huge at this point, it is certainly growing and warrants attention.

Much of it won’t appear new if you’ve been reading the beer compared to wine discussion for the past several years. But, you know, not everyone has. So it’s worth taking the time to move from Point A to Point B and so on with him. Words like innovation (“Innovation is a hot topic in the beverage business these days and craft beer presents more opportunities for innovation and product development than most wines if you are aiming at that market segment.”) and complexity are used. It’s interesting to read what somebody who does not live in the beer aisle has to write about beer.

So craft beer has a lot in common with wine and maybe a couple of advantages. With these products more widely available and a growing customer base that is ready and willing to experiment, I think it is plausible and wine and craft beer will increasingly share market space and must take that competition into account.

Something to think about.

And one quick side note:

At the end he suggests that some wineries might start to brew beer. Of course, that’s already happened. There are several wineries across the country who already do brew beer. Notably, in 1997 Korbel Champagne Cellars started Russian River Brewing in northern California and hired Vinnie Cilurzo as brewmaster. Six years later, Korbel decided to get out of the brewing business. Natalie and Vinnie Cilurzo bought the brand and started a brewpub, then a production brewery, in Santa Rosa. Do you think Korbel wishes it could take that decision back?

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About those guys with cans, & a few Monday links

By on October 29, 2012 in Beer & Wine, Musing

Bill Graham, Ska Brewing, Brian Lutz, Oskar BluesLast week’s “Where in the Beer World?” seems to have been a real stumper. My apologies. The facts behind the picture would make a rather long comment, so instead I’ll post the details here.

As a reader pointed out, that’s Bill Graham (Ska Brewing co-founder) on the left. Brian Lutz, the brewer at Oskar Blues when the then-brewpub began packaging Dale’s Pale Ale in cans, is on the right. The picture was taken in July of 2003 at the annual Colorado Brewers Rendezvous in Salida, Colorado.

Oskar Blues started canning on premise late in 2002 and Ska early in 2003. The brewers will release a collaboration beer in November. “It’s been a long time coming, doing something with those guys,” Ska co-founder Dave Thibodeau told Denver Westword. “We do a lot of outdoor activities with them, and we have been thinking we would brew something with them forever.”

Lutz left Oskar Blues a few years later, but recently returned to brewing in Boulder. He’s in charge of the kettles at West Flanders Brewing.

MORE READING

The Plot to Destroy America’s Beer. That headline for the cover story in the Bloomberg Businessweek gives you a good sense of where it is coming from. Not exactly pro AB InBev.

Time To Start Thinking About The Xmas Photo Contest. Alan McLeod writes, “I have to get my brain around the categories this year so that is an announcement for later.” While you wait, browsing at the Faces of Brewing should put you in the mood for more photos.

Craft beer is overtaking wine: SF mag. First notice I spotted about SanFrancisco magazine’s large spread on beer was in Dr. Vino’s wine blog, with the headline that sure gets some attention. Set aside a little time for all the stories (and, yes, the url is moderluxury.com), but start with with Dr. Vino to check out the comments about quality and price (both wine and beer).

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Extreme. Soul. Are we talking about wine or beer?

By on May 30, 2012 in Beer & Wine

A) Wine Enthusiast writer and noted blogger Steve Heimoff asks if a wine can have soul.

Perhaps it’s our more jaded, cautious age that does not permit me to do so, in quite that fashion. I find certain wines “fabulous,” “fantastic,” “stellar” and the like. But anthropomorphising wine isn’t my style. On the other hand, “soul” is just a word. I’ve enjoyed many wines that gave me such “a sensorial onslaught as to capture [my] complete and undivided attention.” Whether or not they had “soul,” I will leave to others to determine.

I wouldn’t call soul just a word. Quite honestly, more than six years after I added the tagline “In search of the soul of beer” here I’m still looking and occasionally wondering just what that means. But there’s more to it than trying to find “stellar” beer.

B) If you’ll recall, I’m a fan of Wine Wars, in large part because the book takes the “sideways” view. Author Mike Veseth has announced his next book will be called Extreme Wine (Honest to goodness, I typed beer right after extreme; pure force of habit.)

Where Wine Wars probed the center of the world wine market, Extreme Wines focuses on edges based on the same theory that wine lovers use when they tilt their glasses “sideways” and analyze the liquid’s rim: the forces of change first make themselves visible at the outer limits.

This, of course, is good reason to consider the role of extreme beer. In fact, this table of contents is just waiting for somebody to replace the word wine with beer. And maybe throw in the words barrel-aged, Brettanomyces and hops.

1. X-Wines: In Vino Veritas?
2. Extreme Wine: Best and the Worst
3. The Fame Game: Most Famous, Most Forgotten and Most Infamous
4. Sold Out: Rarest, Most Unusual and Most Ubiquitous
5. Money Wine: Cheapest, Most Expensive and Most Overpriced
6. Extreme Wine Booms and Busts
7. Extreme Wine People
8. Fifteen Minutes: Celebrity Wine
9. [The Medium is the] Message in a Bottle: Television, Film and the Web
10. Around the World in 80 Wines: Extreme Wine Tourism
11. Extreme Wine by the Numbers
12. Tasting Notes from the Edge

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Waiting for the Oxford Companion to the Oxford Companions

By on October 24, 2011 in Beer & Wine, Books

You have any idea how many books Oxford University Press published in its “companion” series before it got around to beer?

A lot. Heck, The Oxford Companion to the Brontës is 640 pages. There’s The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television and The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (1272 pages, but “the only book on the Supreme Court that a layman should ever need.”)

Most of the books that are part of the franchise must have been more popular when they were new, because it appears these days that beyond the top two on the list none of them outperforms the 100th best selling beer entry (Clone Brews, at this moment) on Amazon.

Those top two, of course, are the shiny, new The Oxford Companion to Beer and the third edition to The Companion to Wine, still selling briskly five years after it was published. I think we all expect the Beer Companion will have the same sort of legs, but that’s a topic for another day.

I own the wine book and recall the excitement within the wine blogosphere when it was released in 2006 (plus that Costco stocked a bunch as a price that beat Amazon). I occasionally hoist it off the shelf — either when I have a particular question or feel in need of exercise, given that it weighs half again as much as the hefty beer book — and I never think to question what I find. I certainly don’t remember it being scrutinized the same way as the Beer Companion.1

So I asked a few wine bloggers if I missed something. Mike Veseth, author of Wine Wars, wrote back:

I cannot remember any sharp criticisms when the Oxford Companion to Wine appeared. Certainly the release of the current edition was celebrated, not criticized. I suspect that this is because the OCW project is well established and has set the standard for comprehensive wine books.

I asked Jancis Robinson (editor of OCW) what she thought and she replied that, while there were no harsh critiques when the OCW was first released in 1994, she thinks there would be some today just because the times are different — more bloggers and social media forums where opinions are shared.

Yep, the Netscape browser was brand new in 1994 and Amazon didn’t exist. Nor did Rate Beer or Beer Advocate or any of the blogs on the right. But I’m still trying to figure out if that explains the all that has already been written about the Beer Companion.

Are the errors that grievous? Is it that those who really care about beer (and the facts related to beer) care than much more? Is beer (and beer history) that complicated, subjective to interpretation, lost in the ether?

As I was typing this post Alan McLeod added Garrett Oliver’s comments to OCBeerCommentary, and then Simon Johnson’s thoughtful conclusions popped up in my feed reader. (Yes, two Simon Johnson links inside of a week; no more, I promise.)

Go read them, because so far I’m long questions and short answers.

1 OCBeerCommentary provides both links to what has been written about the Beer Companion (see “general comments”) and comments that generally identify errata.

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Apparently wine can also be ‘dank’

By on October 10, 2011 in Beer & Wine, Hops

Following up on last week’s discussion of “dank” and the need for meaningful beer descriptors.

  • Gourmet magazine “looks at marijuana’s culinary trip from wacky weed to haute herb.” We aren’t just talking about wine that smells like weed.

    In wine country, pot-infused wines are the open secrets that present themselves in unmarked bottles at the end of winemaker dinners and very VIP tours (it bears mentioning that most winemakers are cagey enough to keep the manufacture of such wines far from winery grounds). The wines range in style and intensity as broadly as “normal” wines and winemakers do. Some practitioners of the fruit-forward, higher-alcohol, New World style take a similarly aggressive approach to infusing wine. “I know a winemaker that takes a couple of barrels a year and puts a ton of weed in it and lets it steep, and that wine is just superpotent,” says a James Beard Award–winning chef, who also asked not to be named. Henry, though, makes more classically styled wines, and with that reserve comes a more subtle hand with the cannabis. Adjusted for volume, “special” wines can range from under a pound of marijuana per 59-gallon barrel to over 4 pounds per barrel. The result is a spectrum ranging from a gentle, almost absinthe-like effect to something verging on oenological anesthetic.

  • And from Huff Post, “10 Esoteric Wine Descriptors (and What They Really Mean!)” Because you want to make sure you fit in when you describe what’s in your glass as “broad/fleshy” or “racy.”
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    At this rate, beer will disappear in 7 years

    By on September 14, 2011 in Beer & Wine

    The latest Gallup Poll screams the news from the mountain tops. DRINKERS PREFERENCE FOR BEER FALLS 5%.

    And, as in 2005, wine gains. So now 36% of drinkers prefer beer (that will be down to 1% in seven years if beer continues to lose 5% per year) and 35% favor wine. Lots of numbers that people who sell wine must love (look at the preferences of college graduates). Then, of course, there is the last paragraph.

    While meaningful, this year’s shifts are not much different in magnitude from those seen in 2005 – changes that proved temporary. Whether beer continues to lose ground to other forms of liquor or rebounds may depend on the future direction of young adults’ drink preferences.

    Maybe this will turn out to be a big deal and maybe it won’t. Certainly anybody running a brewery, particularly one with shrinking sales, should be bothered if it turns out that younger drinkers are abandoning beer for wine.

    But what Gallup apparently missed when it formulated the questions — at least the ones we’re seeing the answers for — is that there’s beer and there’s beer.

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    Book review: The ‘sideways’ view

    By on September 6, 2011 in Beer & Wine, Books

    Wine WarsIf I’m going to finish a book or magazine article (or blog post, for that matter) I expect the author to tell me something new or provoke me to consider something I thought I knew about in a different way.

    (Of course it should be well written and focus on a topic that interests me. I sense I’ve read as much about Lady Gaga as I ever will, although I’m sure there’s plenty more that will amuse somebody else.)

    I was reminded of this well into Mike Veseth’s Wine Wars when he wrote:

    “Well, in wine tasting you learn that sometimes it can be helpful to tilt your glass at an angle and look at the edge of the wine. Sometimes this ‘sideways’ view provides information about the past and clues to the future. It’s time to take a sideways look at the future of wine.”

    I was that far into the book (page 195) because Veseth takes a sideways look when discussing “The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists” (the sub-title of the book and the three sections in which is it divided). The first two parts help understand what’s different about shopping for wine at Trader Joe’s and Costco, and that was enough to keep my attention. Veseth is an economist and that’s one of the reasons I subscribe to his blog feed.

    (And maybe the history of Blue Nun is special because way back when a friend who knew much more about wine than I did at the time actually sent back a bottle of Blue Nun. Who the hell knows when a bottle of Blue Nun is “off”?)

    I wish there were more books like this focused on beer. If you look at Amazon’s list of best selling beer books the “how to” theme is pretty apparent. (The same is true of wine, but those aren’t the books I read.)

    That’s why I plan to break away from drinking beer long enough at the Great American Beer Festival to listen to the discussion of “The Evolution of Beer Scholarship” in the Brewers Studio Pavilion (scroll down).

    The writing and editorial team of the newly published The Oxford Companion to Beer, will discuss the developing resources in beer education. Compared to a well-defined wine academia, beer education has always been pretty thin, but that’s changing fast. Discussing resources from oral tradition to iPhone apps, Editor-in-Chief, Garrett Oliver, will lead this conversation on the current demand for genuine information and scholarship on beer, and what’s been happening to meet that demand and make brewing studies deeper and more interesting than ever before.

    If I don’t make it and you do please tell them you’re pretty sure there is a demand for more information about hops.

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