Month: February 2008

Going to extremes in pursuit of an ‘extreme’

Well, if we’re going to ask a woman about marketing to women, maybe we should check in with the Gen Y crowd when discussing “millennials” and beer. Both what they say, and what they will do.

Exhibit #1: Swordboarder’s comment the other day. He uses the word “they” but he’s the same age as Sierra Nevada Brewing. Sierra Nevada is Gen Y.

Exhibit #2: Steve at Summer of Beer, 26 and a grad student, heads off in pursuit of Deschutes The Abyss.

In case you don’t know, Abyss has been the “extreme beer” du Jour, particularly in Oregon.

Version 1.0, released last year, won all kinds of awards, and even deserved to. An 11% abv imperial stout, v2.0 it was aged in French oak, pinot noir and bourbon barrels since March. It’s got “extreme” written all over it.

Steve begins, “Conceding that it will not make its way into the Inland Valley, I am about to embark on a journey to the find Deschutes The Abyss.”

Along the way he might pick up a case of Olympia for his dad.

It’s a short trip, with a happy ending.

We’re screwed – The jinx is in

Sprecher Black BavarianOK, we’re not at the point that Time magazine has put 750ml bottles of beer on its cover and declared “Beer Is The New Wine.” That would definitely be a jinx.

But when the business types start paying attention — as BusinessWeek does with “Micro Beers Brew Up Big Business” — I get nervous.

Particularly when there’s every chance that 2008 isn’t going to look all that great for “craft beer.” In the next few months the totals from 2007 will come in and they are going to look great.

Don’t be fooled. Things aren’t that rosy. You’ve probably noticed that the economy could be looking better, and you might have heard a little something about beer ingredient costs skyrocketing with higher prices to follow. Not exactly a formula for double-digit increases in volume sales this year.

And if brewers hit that bump in the road what are business magazines and newspapers going to write?

In BusinessWeek we get just what you’d expect — a micro history of microbreweries and a list of beers to drink. Before we get to the latter I’d suggest you pass on history according to BusinessWeek and pick up the new All About Beer magazine (March 08 with bottles of beer and hunks of cheese on the front) magazine.

Lew Bryson’s “The Real History of Beer” is, to use the word of the week around here, more “authentic.”

Now the list of “America’s Best Craft Beers” (according to Nick Passmore and BusinessWeek):

Alaskan Pale
Anchor Liberty Ale
Anderson Valley Boont ESB
Breckenridge 471 IPA
Full Sail Amber
Ommegang Abbey Ale
Ringwood Old Thumper
Rogue Shakespeare Stout
Sprecher Black Bavarian
Stoudt’s Scarlet Lady

Not to pick on BusinessWeek, but the Black Bavarian is looking anything but black because they used a picture of Hefe Weiss (that’s why the photo above features the real Black Bavarian).

Fact is this is fine list and I’m glad they noticed.

Just a little nervous.

Who’ll be deciding what our beer choices are?

TrendsetterThis is a story overtly about wine, so you might not care, and about trends, so you might not care.

Rather than revisiting the discussion about if we want our beer hip or sick I will simply argue that trends matter because they may determine what’s available for us to drink. After all, hipsters managed to slow the demise of Pabst.

So consider this report last week from the annual Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in Sacramento, the largest conference of the year for the U.S. wine business.

The wines you’ll be savoring five years from now are being picked today by enological trendsetters barely old enough to drink.

Is it possible we might substitute the word beer for wine (and enological)?

The story reports that “what they’re looking for – wines that are quirky, regional, with rich background stories – isn’t what the mainstream domestic industry seems to be selling today.”

Can you think of a mainstream domestic drinks industry that seems to be struggling with growth?

Go give it a read. You may also enjoy the direction of this commentary: When the Young Eat the Rich.

You’ll find fodder for both sides of the “extreme beer” debate, for instance, but I’ll leave you with two takeaways:

– SABMiller may not yet have figured out how to wow the Gen Y millennials, but is right about their impact. They want products that are handcrafted, unique . . . “authentic.”

– Sommeliers, or Cicerones, are important.

And I also have to repeat the final quote of the story: “We way overestimate the knowledge of the American consumer.”

Is he talking about us?

Monday morning musing: German brewers’ woes

Paulander brewhouseI think I need to talk to New Glarus brewmaster Dan Carey, and finish a conversation started 11 years ago.

He was jet lagged but wired at the time, having just returned from Germany, where he bought a beautiful well-used and bargain-priced copper brewing system that would be the centerpiece of New Glarus expansion in 1997. He also looked a little sad. “We’re 50 years ahead of the Germans,” he said.

This wasn’t nationalistic boasting, a claim that American beer culture had surpassed Germany’s. This was history. He was speaking about how the number of breweries in Germany was (and still is) shrinking in the wake of consolidation. Something the United States went through during the last century.

I thought of this last week when reading stories about how German beer sales continue to shrink.

Is there an antidote? One story suggested, “Micro-Brewers Hope to Fight Sinking Beer Sales in Germany.”

What brewpub entrepreneur Oliver Lemke of Berlin has to say will sound familiar to American beer drinkers.

“There used to be 100 breweries in this neighborhood alone. They died out in the 1970s with the trend toward mono-breweries. The big breweries – for example Warsteiner or Licher – said: ‘We’re only going to make one sort of beer, a premium pilsner, and we’ll market it nationwide.’ And that inevitably leads to a dead-end. At some point, even the world’s biggest idiot notices that there’s virtually no difference between a Warsteiner and Licher.”

And also a little startling.

“The German beer drinker thinks he knows a lot about beer, but most of them know very, very, little.”

Perhaps they don’t know as much about beer as those deep into beer geekdom, but let’s be honest — they’ve still got a stronger beer culture. We talk about differences between the Northwest and the Northeast and argue about America’s best beer city (kind of silly if you let Portland, Oregon, participate). Well, they’ve got Köln and Munich and Bamberg, and scores of villages in in Franconia and . . . It is a different league.

Does that mean even more will be lost if the heartless consolidation continues? Or that the strength of the culture will keep German beer from tumbling into a monoculture as American beer did in the U.S. did during the twentieth century?

I’d like to take the optimistic view.

The Session #13 announced: Organic beer

The SessionThose of us just now emerging from a Session #12-induced fog were a bit surprised to see that the topic has already by set for Session #13.

For those of you good a math, #13 means we are heading into the second year of The Session. As we used to say in the Midwest, What a hoot.

Chris O’Brien at Beer Activist makes it simple for March if not necessarily as straightforward as it might look: Publish a post related to organic beer.

Lots of brewers use Certified Organic malt and/or hops but have not had their facilities and processes certified. Legally and in practical fact these beers are not organic and are prohibited from being marketed as organic. But for this Session, it’s up to you to decide what to count as organic.

So if you define organic as a beer that cures the hangover from a barley wine . . . go for it.