Stan Hieronymus

New Beer Rules

SamichlausWith a nod toward Bill Maher’s “New Rules” as opposed to Miller’s Man Laws …

THE BACKGROUND: A little over a week ago we were in California for some meetings. For evening diversion, Real Beer co-founder Mark Silva brought along vintage beers for “vertical” tastings (where you sample the same beer across a number of years).

In that spirit, Banjo Bandolas hauled down some old beers from the 1980s his uncle, Bud Lang, had given him. Lang was the first managing editor at All About Beer magazine, but these were not beers carefully cellared for a special occasion. They were beers that spent cool winters and hot summers in a Los Angeles garage.

Some were strong beers we might have hoped would stand up to those temperature swings but others – like the Millstream lager out of Iowa – had no chance.

The most interesting looking beers were a Thomas Hardy’s Ale from 1983, Samichlaus from 1986, Mort Subite Gueuze from the 1980s (no date) and Anchor Old Foghorn from the 1980s (again, no vintage). They would all sell for a chunk on eBay, but Banjo pointed out that in good conscience he could never sell beer that he suspected would taste like we found out these did.

We drank the beers (not all at once) against other vintages that had been stored in friendlier conditions. In each case they were the oldest beer in the lineup, and in each case the least enjoyable. Maybe it was age, but mostly it seemed like the garage won.

The 1996 Samichlaus (brewed in 1995, packaged in 1996, a lager that had spent 10 years in the bottle) was spectacular, rich and complex. The 1986 – at the time the strongest beer in the world (Sam Calagione was still in high school) – tasted like prune juice mixed with vodka. The difference between the ’83 Hardy’s and an ’89 Silva brought was as dramatic.

In each case, the well-cellared beers gained complexity, drank smoother, and acted like we hope beers will when we lay them down. The cooked beers were lifeless, not just wanting when it comes to carbonation, but one-dimensional, single-note beers.

One other thing they shared in common, and that was lack of good closure. The Mort Subite cork crumbled when I pulled it from the bottle, and on each of the other three the inside of the cap was rusted.

Giving us …

NEW BEER RULE #1: When you open a beer for a vertical tasting and there is rust under the cap it’s time to seriously lower your expectations for what’s inside the bottle.

Rusted cap

Who, or what, do you love?

Love & BeerIf starts with Lew Bryson’s post What We “Owe” the Industry (even if you don’t wade through he comments which weave here and there) then what follows might make more sense. Alan McLeod brought something else to the conversation when he asked Do We Love The Beer Or Brewer?

For me these questions are related because b) I don’t love the beer or the brewer; as a consumer I appreciate the experience and as a journalist I live for the story. And a) the first city editor I worked for, Bill Schmelzle, taught me that nothing else in a story mattered if I didn’t get the facts right (and when I proved I could do that then he introduced the importance of balanced reporting).

Principals in a story could expect this, not because I “owed” it to them but because I worked for the people who bought the paper every day. Is this an old-fashioned notion, irrelevant in these days (of blogs, Fox television, “we media” and specialty magazines)? It doesn’t matter. It’s part of my DNA.

Newspapers should be advocates for the communities which they serve, whether they put the word “advocate” in their masthead or not. Granted, specialty magazines are a step or three away from newspapers. But at my local Borders I only have to walk three feet from DRAFT and All About Beer magazines (Beer Advocate is not on newstands) to pick up the New Yorker or Harpers. That’s pretty close and heady company.

Let’s say the community where I live stinks at the village center because we need some central sewage system instead of a hodge-podge of septic tanks. The local paper isn’t doing a very good job if it writes only about how pretty the new gardens are downtown – while the smell of sewage overwhelms the petunias.

Thus it drives me crazy that Ashton Lewis wrote, “But the way I see it is that a beer magazine boasting to be the ‘Beer Advocate’ should focus on the positive.”

Mr. Bryson puts it more eloquently:

But “advocate” does not mean “worship blindly,” or “defend without judgment.” They stand outside the industry, and they judge it by their own standards. And by those standards, whether you agree with them or not, they believe that they advocate “beer” — not “the craft beer industry”, not “your beer” — by speaking plainly about beers they think fall short, breweries they think engage in bad practices, retailers and wholesalers who don’t measure up to their standards.

That’s actually more likely to take place at BeerAdvocate.com, in a “we media” sort of way. I want to see more of that in the magazine, more in the other beer magazines and more in the non-beer press.

Of course, most of what appears in the media gets written or spoken in the vast territory between reporting bare facts and offering criticism. There must be a balance. While I already answered the question the headline of Alan’s post (“Do we love the beer or the brewer?”) what he’s really writing about is finding that balance for yourself.

Do you want somebody to tell you what beers you should like? Or where you should enjoy them? Is there some other reason you read about beer or talk about it over, of course, beer? He’s asking good questions.

Answer them and you’ll better understand what you want an “advocate” to do for you.

Friday. The Session. Be there.

Come Friday a bunch of us are going to write about stouts. The theme, class, is “Not your father’s Irish stout.”

Do we have to have a name, too? I’d like to get that out of the way, so I can help answer Alan McLeod’s question Do We Love the Beer or Brewer? and track all the chatter Lew Bryson provoke with his post What We ‘Owe’ the Industry, which was followed by a lengthy discussion at Beer Advocate.

Particularly since I disagree with everybody.

So in the interest of speed I’m picking a name, but not insisting Alan use it when he hosts in April. When we have hosts use the same name two consecutive months that will be the official name. (Kind of like the kid in “A Thousands Clowns.”) The danger, of course, is that it will become sport to keep picking different names.

I've got the next round

The name is …

The Session.

No.

Another Round.

No.

The Session.

Yes, The Session. Unless I change my mind before Friday.

What is craft beer?

Growth chart
Don’t expect me to answer that question. It was posed by Stonch at Lew Bryson’s Seen Through a Glass, and I started to comment there before I realized I was about to exceed a sensible length for comments.

The Brewers Association has a specific definition (scroll down on that page):

CRAFT BEER: Craft beers are produced with 100% barley or wheat malt or use other fermentable ingredients that enhance (rather than lighten) flavor. Craft beers only come from craft brewers.

And …

CRAFT BREWER: An American craft brewer is small, independent and traditional. Craft beer comes only from a craft brewer.

So when the Brewers Association collects data and reports 11.7% growth in 2006 over 2005 it isn’t including beers from Yuengling, all-malt beers from Anheuser-Busch, Blue Moon from Coors and many others.

Over time that’s made compiling and comparing numbers a little easier. For instance, had the BA (then the IBS) included Michelob Specialty beers in its calculations in the late 1990s then craft beer sales would have appeared to take a giant leap of (a guess) 800,000 barrels in 1997. We would have been comparing apples to oranges. The number is a guess because A-B never released figures for its specialty beers. In other words, the BA/IBS couldn’t have included them anyway.

Likewise, Coors does not report sales of Blue Moon Belgian White. Except in 2005, when they confirmed production of 200,000 barrels (more than the entire production of all but six craft breweries). They haven’t made a similar revelation this year, but I’ve heard from somebody – not at Coors, but who should know – that sales more than doubled to 500,000.

Just for fun, let’s plug that into the chart above, increasing both the 2005 and 2006 figures and then doing the math. Presto. Growth of more than 16%. Does that difference matter? Probably.

That’s the equivalent of nearly 7 million cases of Blue Moon that people are grabbing at the grocery store or convenient store, often from shelves where few craft beers land. If those drinkers are anything like everybody else who drinks craft beer – and remember these people (who may be you) are paying a premium price for Blue Moon, haven’t read the BA definition, and (poor fools) think it is craft beer – then they are going to try other beers that cost more and aren’t advertised on television.

This is not a new discussion. Fred Eckhardt wrote a great column on this subject 10 years ago in All About Beer magazine. He began with a definition from Vince Cottone written in 1986 (less confusing times, perhaps).

Cottone, the first to use the term, “craft brewer,” was implacably uncompromising in what he meant by that name. “Craft brewery,” he said, “describe(s) a small brewery using traditional methods and ingredients to produce a handcrafted, uncompromised beer that is marketed locally (and is) True Beer.” He also listed seven other small brewers as brewing “non-true” beers, including San Francisco’s Anchor (although a “craft brewery in spirit,” its beer was pasteurized), and six other small brewers who brewed malt extract beer. He had no patience whatever with “contract brewers.”

Eckhardt polled beer industry types in an effort to define “craft beer” and got answers that went beyond that. All of them are worth reading. For balance I suggest lingering words from Tom Schmidt of Anheuser-Busch:

I don’t believe there is anything such as “craft beer.” The use of the term may lead consumers to believe that beer made in some small, quaint place is much better than beer that is produced in a large, efficient brewery, where quality and consistency are the hallmarks. We all fight the same battle using the same raw materials. These supposedly “craft breweries” are finding that, to produce consistent products, they require process controls much the same as the larger breweries. Our brewmasters are (dedicated) “craftsmen,” not just brewing “engineers” who monitor the process from afar. Just because we are successful should not detract from the fact that we are also quality “craftsmen.”

But I confess that my favorite is from Greg Noonan of Vermont Pub & Brewery:

I wish that Vince Cottone had trademarked the term. (He would be) a good arbiter of what is and what isn’t “hand-made.” (He would reject) beers made in “micro-industrial” quarter-million barrel breweries and “fruit beers” made with 0.003 percent fruit-flavored extract. (If Congress were to legislate an appellation, the licensing board should include) Cottone, Carol Stoudt, Randy Reede and Teri Fahrendorf (to ensure) its integrity. Craft brewed (should) mean pure, natural beer brewed in a non-automated brewery of less than 50-barrel brew length, using traditional methods and premium, whole, natural ingredients, and no flavor-lessening adjuncts or extracts, additives or preservatives.

Yes, there are breweries using automation and producing beers I’d call “craft” with a brew length longer than 50 barrels, so feel free to quibble. But not with the spirit in which his definition was written.

We own the niche

Beer giantThere has been a fair amount of hand-wringing as the partnership of Fordham Brewing and Anheuser-Busch prepares to close on its deal to buy Old Dominion Brewing.

That’s understandable. Change is not always good.

But what we should not be worrying about is the fact that Anheuser-Busch is involved in the deal.

Today The Long Tail has an interesting post about “Why niche brands win.” The key paragraph:

Consumers are fleeing the mainstream for the authenticity and quality of niche products. Today, when a big company buys a little one, it hopes that nobody notices. The aim is to keep the indie feel of the niche brand, while applying the distribution and marketing advantages of the big acquiring firm.

So A-B isn’t taking a stake in Old Dominion, which brews less than 30,000 barrels a year, to add to its production (more than 120 million barrels).

Have the beers of Widmer Brewing changed since A-B took a stake in the Oregon company? More recently, how about the beers of Goose Island (which A-B got involved with via Widmer)?

No, and no.

Small brewers – which is pretty much every brewery in America smaller than A-B, Miller and Coors – craft beers than large brewers can’t. OK, technically they can. But to brew a batch the size of Goose Island’s Matilda makes no sense to those guys. Heck, neither would the somewhat more mainstream Goose Island IPA (which Stonch just gave a rave review).

Granted, there was a time when such beers weren’t being produced. But as long as we are willing to pay a fair price I think it’s safe to say we’ve established our niche. It belongs to us, not the brewers. Not even the ones we really like.

That doesn’t mean drinkers of Old Dominion beers (or other outstanding beers it makes like New River Pale Ale) shouldn’t be vigilant. After all, A-B bought a stake in Widmer, not controlling interest. And Goose Island remains firmly in charge at Goose Island.

Old Dominion was sold, although Fordham has the (barely) largest stake. It seems that Fordham is who we should have our eye on.