beers of conviction

I’m finding all sorts of fun things to read when I should be finishing a “real” post here and two lengthy stories for print publications. So some quick bits before I get back to work. Please make sure to read the last item.

Even more alarmingly, the exceptional cask beers which have recently attained national recognition were now regularly featuring across the country. Timothy Taylor’s Landlord. Sharp’s Doom Bar. These are fantastic beers and worthy of praise. They are well worth seeking out as exemplary products. But they are outstanding products within their own context. It seems to me that, rolled out nationally, they lose their provenance.

Go read the whole thing. This is important.

You know you are at the National Homebrewers Conference when you get on an elevator at 5 o’clock in the morning (I had an early flight home) and there’s a guy who still hasn’t been to bed. He is holding a glass full of beer.

I came home from the conference in Minnesota with a notebook full of new, to me, information. It’s still a little wet right now because despite careful packing a bottle of (sour) beer and a bottle of mead did not survive the journey back. I could smell the problem the moment I grabbed my bag off the carousel. Some of what I learned will end up here, some in stories for various publications and some (eventually) in the hops book.

Meanwhile, one quick thought.

Saturday morning the “When Homebrewers Go Pro: Starting Your Own Brewery” panel was packed. Like much of the conference. Steve Parkes (American Brewers Guild) said he had not spoken before audiences this size in more than 10 years. He looked around Club Night (I wouldn’t even begin to try to describe it, but the room was full of more than 1,000 people and clubs brought more than 500 5-gallon kegs) and simply smiled.

So more than 300 people are crammed in to this room Saturday and I am thinking not all these people can really be thinking about starting their own brewery when moderator James Spencer asks just that question and for a show of hands. Scores go up. I think of something the late Greg Noonan told me a dozen years ago.

“When the homebrewers stop entering the profession, and the backyard breweries are squeezed out, then it will become stagnant,” he said. “You gotta keep getting the guys who say, ‘Cool, I can sell the beer I make. I can do it.’ ”

We’re not at the end of the line. Surly Brewing founder Omar Ansari emphasized that toward the end of the proceedings.

“The next wave of brewers is coming,” he said.

Then he posed a question. “What’s going to make those brewers different from one another?”

If you, like I, think fresh Anchor Liberty is still one of the best beers on earth then the announcement that Anchor Brewing has been sold makes a difference on a very personal level.

In terms of the Future of Craft Brewing overall? Not so much.

Not like it would have between 1965 and 1977, when Anchor accounted for 100 percent of sales of what we now call “craft beer.” In 1980 Anchor sold 81 percent of craft beer and still more than half of it in 1984, just before Jim Koch and Samuel Adams beer arrived. Five years later Koch’s Boston Beer Co., at the time contracting to have its beer brewed at struggling old-line breweries with excess capacity, vaulted past Anchor into the No. 1 spot.

Anchor production peaked at 108,000 barrels in 1996 and began to slip a bit by 1998, at which time it accounted for less than 2 percent of “craft” production. Today Anchor brews less than 5 percent of what Boston Beer makes and about 1 percent of the craft beer.

To be clear, Fritz Maytag and Anchor cast outsized shadows. Maytag’s place in history is, well, Maytag’s place in history. We can only guess what beer choices American beer drinkers would have today had he not saved Anchor Brewing in 1965. But whatever the new owners do — and as Jay Brooks writes this new stewardship begins somewhat oddly — it hardly seems likely any changes will reshape the craft beer landscape that Maytag shares great responsibility for creating in the first place.

I’ll leave it to others to speculate about that and to recount much of what Maytag, who remains as chairman emeritus, and everybody he worked with at Anchor accomplished. Instead I suggest considering something he didn’t do.

In 1992 Maytag investigated the possibility of a direct public offering to raise funds for expansion. At the time the five largest small breweries in the country were Boston Beer (273,000 barrels sold), Anchor (82,654), Sierra Nevada Brewing (68,039), Redhook Ale Brewery (49,000) and Pete’s Brewing (35,700).

Bo Burlingham provides the history in “Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big,” writing, “Besides, the company would eventually have to move up to the next level. It was the natural order of things. Every business has to grow or it dies, right?”

Then Maytag changed his mind. “I realized we were doing the IPO out of desperation — because we thought we had to grow,” Burlingham quotes Maytag. “It occurred to me that you could have a small, prestigious, profitable business, and it would be all right . . . So we made the decision not to grow . . . This was not going to be a giant company — not on my watch.”

By 1996, when Anchor sales peaked, Boston Beer had grown to 1.2 million barrels a year. Pete’s Brewing, which also sold beer brewed under contract, rocketed to 425,600 (its top), while Sierra Nevada (265,000) and Redhook (224,578) both more than doubled Anchor.

Ten years later Maytag was interviewed by USA Today. “Big is not always better,” he said. “Small companies like ours can still knock ’em dead.”