musing

Reading Bryan Roth’s story about American beer sales abroad in the latest (37.6) issue of All About Beer magazine this fact about Crazy Mountain Brewing in Colorado jumped out at me.

Another fast-growing market is South Korea, where (Kevin) Selvy sells about 360 barrels a month and is hoping to increase that to 480 in early 2017.

Four hundred and eighty barrels a month would be 5,760 a year. To provide some context, sales in South Korea alone (not even its best foreign market) would have made Crazy Mountain the 184th largest microbrewery in the United States in 2015. There are, of course, 176 larger regional breweries, including Crazy Mountain, and then some rather big breweries not classified as craft. But Crazy Mountain Korea would easily be larger than more than 90% of the 5,000-plus breweries in the U.S.

The other day Zymurgy editor Dave Carpenter wrote about “Five Beer Clichés We Need to Stop Using,” and this was the first.

Brewmaster: I’m not against the word ‘brewmaster’ per se, just its liberal use. All brewmasters are brewers, but not all brewers are brewmasters, just as not all cooks are Michelin-starred chefs. The mere act of upgrading from 5-gallon homebrew batches in a garage to 5-barrel commercial batches in a larger garage does not automatically a brewmaster make. Head brewer? Sure. But let’s use the title ‘brewmaster’ more sparingly.

I was thinking the “how do you define a brewmaster?” topic had come up here before, but if so I’m not very good at figuring out the archives because I couldn’t find it. There was something Garrett Oliver said in 2013 at the European Beer Bloggers Conference.

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MONDAY BEER & WINE LINKS, 12.05.2016

Legal marijuana is affecting the beer industry’s memory.
Killer lead from Jason Notte: “Marijuana’s disruption of short-term memory apparently applies to the argument about its effects on the beer industry. Folks are still saying weed is bad for beer, but nobody seems to remember any of the evidence to the contrary.” And it is followed by a solid takedown of “this purple haze of half-truths” and a report from investment bank Cowen and Co. maintaining that legal marijuana is driving down beer sales. Notte concludes, “It isn’t marijuana harshing the beer industry’s mellow: It’s some harsh truths about where the industry is headed.” [Via MarketWatch]

London’s next beer revolution has begun.
[Via Craft Beer London]
Texas’ Deep Ellum Sells Stake to Storied Craft Breweries.
[Via Brewbound]
The Riddle of Scarcity in New England.
[Via All About Beer]
In the first story, Will Hawkes concludes, “The implications for independent London breweries are obvious. The advantage from being local only goes so far: those who will thrive over the next few years will do so because their beer is consistently good.” In the second, a Dallas brewery intent on growing apparently much larger, sells majority interest in the operation to an investment group. In the third, Jeff Alworth examines the choices breweries that brew passionately loved beers make related to producing and selling those beers. You may parse all this information differently. But it seems to me that stories about how many breweries is too many breweries overlook that a fundamental shift. Some owners — well, lots of them — have written a business plan based on ongoing growth. But the way some others measure success has changed, and there is room for plenty more local breweries whose founders have realistic expectations.

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