monday links

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a brewery profile that includes the brewer/founder being interviewed say something along the lines of, “We don’t want to be huge.”

I thought of this last week when I read Jeff Alworth’s post about Skagit Valley Malt suddenly closing, because I had learned a lot more about the business of running a craft malting company after meeting Jeff Bloem during the Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery Land Beer Fest a couple of weeks ago.

He started Murphy & Rude Malting Co. in his basement. He’s expanded, but has been cautious.

Between the time I read the question in Alworth’s headline (“Is craft malt in trouble?”) and a post at Good Beer Hunting Sightlines highlighting the risk of craft malt expansion I dropped him an email. I probably would not have if I had known Kate Bernot would contact him for the Sightlines story. (Because, honestly, I am inherently lazy.)

I asked him if he could describe a scenario where craft malting is viable. Turns out, he is living one. He wrote back:

“Our recent modest capacity expansion served as a much needed right-sizing that improved cash flow, jettisoned us into healthy profitability, and fixed a plethora of issues we were struggling with as an under-built craft malt house — bumpy cash-flow due to delayed invoicing brought about by constant out-of-stocks and backorders.

“This right-sizing was Phase 1 of a five-year, three-phase growth plan and Phase 2 sees us making additional modest investments in additional production equipment, as well as much-needed material handling upgrades that are meant to reduce the amount of time-sucking manual labor costs associated with getting a batch from steep tank to bags on a pallet.

“What I have come to terms with is that the financing play for expansion has to jive with malt house aspirations, not the other way around. Letting the needs and requirements of the financing terms influence our goals or take undue risks is simply too reckless for me. In short, unwise ego-driven aspirations need to be replaced with modest, incremental growth strategies utilizing myriad funding options all at the same time (private capital, bank, community rounds, government program funding, and organic).

“It takes forever because in funding an agriculture-based business you immediately go from an ocean of financing options to a hot tub of very hard to find slow-money-minded investment partners. While customer demand is there, trying to service all of it immediately doesn’t necessarily make financial sense.”

In her story, Bernot talks to Ron Extract at Garden Path Fermentations in Washington, and he points to a parallel between breweries and maltsters. Expansion at any cost doesn’t always work out, so I am left with questions. Are economies of scale more important for maltsters than brewers? Are craft maltsters agents of change? Are brewers, and ultimately drinkers, willing to pay for this change?

You might also enjoy

– Why Rocket Pop Is This Summer’s Hottest Beer Flavor. This may or may not be true, but I am totally down with the “taste the stick” experience.

“When you eat those popsicles, you taste the actual stick,” WeldWerks head brewer Skip Schwartz says. Think of gnawing the cold, wet piece of wood, sucking out the last sugary juices. “Even if it’s not a predominant flavor, to me it’s part of that beer,” he says.

– What Does It Mean to Be an Asian American Brewer? The next question should be, What will it mean in another decade?

– Beer Group Asks Drinkers, Legislators to Pick Sides in Beer’s Battle with Spirits. But what if I like wine?

– Henekey’s Long Bar and the birth of the pub chain. The rabbit hole here leads to Norah Docker, and if you keep going to “The Judge, the Duke and the Frenchman.”

– A Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century California Steam Beer. Michael Jackson once referred to steam beer as the lone American indigenous beer style. Now we know better.

– Man over machine. Spoiler alert, in Jake Against (recipe written by a human) against The Machine (AI recipe) Jake Against wins.

– Defining Craft: Italian Do it Better. I can’t agree, because adding a few more stipulations and even making it a legal definition means little to consumers. Same old problem.

Hop Queries subscribers have seen Scott Lafontaine mentioned multiple times in my newsletter, most recently about the impact of maturity on aroma and flavor. But he knows a bit about non-alcoholic beer, and rice was one of the reasons he chose to join the faculty at the University of Arkansas.

“A lot of schools want a brewing program,” he told the Fayatteville Flyer. “But you have to have an agricultural product to be successful with one. Arkansas has rice, which is a very underutilized crop when you look at how brewers treat it right now. Most brewers use it as an adjunct [a supplement rather than an essential ingredient]; almost as an afterthought. But there’s so much more potential when you look at how breeders are working with aromatic rice varieties. And since I also wanted to diversify myself from my former advisor, who was working with hops, I decided Arkansas was the right fit for me.”

He is looking at the potential of several varietals.

ARoma 22 is one of them. It is a jasmine-type aromatic rice developed by the Arkansas Rice Breeding Program, which is a part of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. Over the last ten years the program has developed a total of sixteen rice varieties, of which three have been aromatic lines.

Contrast this with what Anheuser-Busch wants from the rice it uses in Budweiser. When I wrote “Brewing Local” A-B was the largest buyer of rice in the United States, and using about about 8 to 9 percent of the total crop annually.

“We don’t want grassy (like fresh-cut grass),” said David Maxwell, then the brewing director at A-B InBev. Mold will jump out at you, like walking into a basement.” would will be looking for a starchy taste. Rice has a higher starch content and lower protein content than any other cereal adjunct. “We want quality starch,” he said, and freshness is the key.

Gasp
Anchor Brewing cuts national distribution, cancels Christmas Ale
Anchor has made Christmas Ale since 1975. It is/was known for its annually changing combination of spices a different hand-drawn label featuring a tree each year. A small amount will be for sale solely at Anchor Public Taps for visitors to the tasting room. That’s it.

An Anchor representative cited “time-intensive and costly brewing and packaging requirements” as the reason for the change. Christmas Ale is unlikely to return next year, the representative said.

Garrett Kelly, a former brewer at Anchor, indicated to the San Francisco Chronicle that the recent news confirmed concerns he and others voiced after the sale to Sapporo. “The loss of a beer as iconic as the Anchor Christmas Ale, the first American holiday beer post prohibition, is a loss for not only beer nerds like me, but anyone with an interest in preserving culture against the grinding pressure of corporate Darwinism,” Kelly wrote the newspaper.

Just as stunning is the news that Anchor will only sell its beers, including iconic Anchor Steam Beer, in California. Currently, the beer is available in all 50 states.

Sustainability
Breweries are starting to capture carbon — from beer
Clinton Mack, Austin Beerworks’s cellar manager, uses techniques developed by NASA to capture the naturally produced CO₂ and dissolve the molecules into beer.

You can make more money from a car park than a vineyard
Wine root systems on Santorini can be 400 years old. This story is a reminder that sustainability, which I write about often in Hop Queries but not enough here, is complicated.

You might also enjoy
– The Myth of the Mexican Lager — Brewing Cerveza Chango from Desperado

– Everlasting Hype: The Enduring Appeal of Nano Breweries
There was a time more than a dozen years ago I tried, although not too seriously, to figure out how small a brewery needed to be to qualify as nano.

Had I not opted for brevity last week, I would have commented on a ranking of beer cities by Real Estate Witch. Several stories that hit my radar in the week since give me a chance to.

First, the initial thoughts. We lived in or adjacent to three of the cities on the list (Denver, St. Louis and Atlanta) in the last half dozen years and spent multiple days in several others, including Jacksonville. Not to make fun of Jacksonville, but if I came up for a formula for ranking beer cities and Jacksonville was 12th and Atlanta 44th I would rethink my recipe. And, the only city in the top 10 I haven’t spent a decent amount of time in recently is Cincinnati. We’ll be for a week next month, so No. 2? Cool. Plus, it will give me a chance to catch up with Beer Dave.

I am still wondering who this list (and one that ranks the best weed cities) is for and what the tie-in is to selling real estate. Is it for beer tourists? For tourists who not quite so focused on beer? For locals? For people who primarily drink where the beer in their glass is made? For Stan? Other than giving me something to think about, the answer to the final question is “no.”

Anyway, take a look at these posts from last week.

– Evaluating beer cities.
– What Defines a Great Austin Bar? Doug Has Thoughts.
– Gay Bars Aren’t Disappearing; They’re Changing.
– Book review: Desi Pubs by David Jesudason.
– Book review: Where Everybody Knows Your Name.

In the first, Jeff Alworth suggests an “immature sense of beer culture here in the US.” Not to take that out of context, although maybe I am, I would not write that. I think this is a country with multiple cultures found in bars, brewpubs, taprooms, etc. Beer may or may not be central to them. The following posts provide examples.

Consider this from the second: “The common theme among Doug’s bars is that they are mostly genuine Texas dive bars, which I would define as a bar I typically wouldn’t take my children to, which often appears to be structurally unsound and, notably, already features a wide assortment of stickers on its walls. They also seem to be bars that broadly refuse to surrender to trendiness or to pretensions of modernity, but Doug shrugs this off.”

And this from the third: “The bars that seem to be thriving are ones that managed to embrace the breadth and depth of the LGBTQ+ community. The kind of bar that used to serve only older folks or maybe only young people, or only white people or only men, those bars sometimes seem to struggle. I think bars that have figured out how to embed themselves deeply in the community, maybe being used as a different kind of space during the day than during the night, seem to be thriving.”

You might also enjoy
– Start with Alan McLeod’s craft beer fan exit survey, and then read The Post-Craft Beer World. End times?

– These Women Are Breaking Texas’s Craft Brewery Glass Ceiling.

– Introducing “Hazy.”

It’s Memorial Day in America
Everybody’s on the road
Let’s remember our fallen heroes
Y’all be sure and drive slow
          — James McMurtry (listen here)

The wild flowers are blooming and it has been a fine weekend for hiking in western Colorado. So just the basics . . .

– Black Brewers Trade Group Sets Historic Precedent in Alcohol Industry.

– The Brewers Association responds to questions about CBC. Stick around for the comments.

– Alan McLeod adds more comments. Scroll down.

– Children and Dogs in Pubs and Bars.

– It is possible to have fun drinking beer in Paris.

– Bridging into lager.

– When Dogs Can Fly: Maryland’s Second Largest Brewery Leaves the State.

– The Best Beer Cities in the U.S. (2023 Data).

– Hello Darkness My Old Friend — In Search of American Porter.

– Funky Buddha Brewery founders buy company back from Constellation Brands. The beginning of a trend?

Lest your think, based on last week’s links, that the Craft Brewers Conference had no redeeming qualities read what Stephanie Grant wrote in her newsletter. She witnessed shining moments as well as the less pleasant ones.

She’s not about to overlook the latter, writing, “But before we look at growth, we must fix the problems within the industry. We have to reduce harm to our most vulnerable members. Otherwise, we will lose incredibly talented people because, frankly, we couldn’t get our shit together.”

– One of the high moments for many was an event to introduce the National Black Brewers Association. The association plans to . . . promote the Black brewing community; increase the number of African Americans in the brewing industry at all levels of production, especially ownership and brewmaster; exercise political influence by developing and advocating for effective policy; and foster an understanding of the history and legacy of African American brewing in the United States.

The organization’s first initiatives will include organizing a National Black Brewers Day celebrated in ten jurisdictions (cities or states) on Oct. 10. The day will recognize Theodore Mack Sr., one of the first first African American brewery owners in the country. Coincidentally, Oct. 10 is Indigenous People’s Day.

Funding for NBBA got off to a good start when Boston Beer company announced it is donating $225,000 to the association.

By the numbers
– Belgium suffers humiliation at World Beer Cup with only two awards
The Brussels Times story with the alarmist headline points out the competition had a total of 24 “Belgian-style” beer categories, for which US beers took home most of the prizes. But that was true across the board. US brewers entered 80 percent of the beers and won 87 percent of the medals. In 2018 they won 80 percent of the medals, and in 2022 83 percent. The number of non-US medalist dropped from 51 to 40 between 2022 and 2023. California brewers alone won 53 medals.

– Why beer was cheaper in 1516
“According to ZipRecruiter the average wages for a day labourer in Virginia (in 2023) would be $130.88 per day. In terms of purchasing power, a Bavarian day labourer (in 1516)without keep, if he spent a whole day’s wage on beer could buy 18 litres of beer, or 38 16oz pints, while our modern labourer could purchase just shy of 19, basically half as much.”

Your turn, Miller Lite
– Women drinking beer clothed
– Have all the beers gone woke?
“Think of it this way, whatever your political inclinations: The beers are the drinking buddies you suspect really don’t have your best interests at heart when they suggest you order just one more at the bar before you head home. They’ve been putting all of the rounds on your tab, and are drinking with the other guy at the bar who really irks you.”

Thumbs down
– This Beer Was Brewed Specifically for Shoving Up a Chicken’s Butt.
– Bad Collaborations
“I’ll throw it to you. Beer Can Chicken Beer: brilliant synergy or embarrassing gaffe?”

You might also enjoy
– A day in the life
Martyn Cornell writes, “I will gladly put my hand up and say yes, I am a lucky fecker, there are very few other people who will get the opportunity to brew a collaboration beer at one of the best-known breweries, certainly in North America, possibly on the planet. What have I done to deserve it? I’d like to hope researching and writing more than 1.5 million words on the subject of beer and the history of beer over the past 35 and more years, which has bought me much pleasure, a few prizes, but little financial reward, at least entitles me to a jolly occasionally.”

– Appalachian Mountain Brewery buys itself back
It doesn’t happen very often, but you can go home again. (It would be fun to know what the owners of AMB received when they sold their brewery in 2018 and what it cost them to buy it back from Anheuser-Busch, wouldn’t it?) In 1995, Miller Brewing bought Shipyard Brewing. In 2000, Miller sold the brewery back to its original owners. In 2003, I talked to principals Fred Forsley and Alan Pugsley about their experience for an article that appeared in The New Brewer.

Asked about the future (remember, 20 years ago), Forsley said, “I think there are going to be larger regionals that are successful and I think there are going to be smaller breweries that do well. In other words, I don’t think the middle size breweries will be there, that it’s difficult to survive. I think there’s room for people who are doing it for the love of beer, but not to have a growing business. But I think the economics are difficult for some of the people in the middle. The reality of life is that if you want to grow you have to feed the growth machine. You can stay small and be successful and be very happy, and I encourage that.”