musing

Craft beer and the necessity of remaining dynamic

Sorry. The conversation about what is craft beer just won’t go away, and Blue Moon Belgian White often ends up in there somewhere.

But, dang it, Dave Bailey (HardKnott Dave) proves there is still something new to be said when he asks “Is Blue Moon craft?” He walks us through a definition, examining if and how Blue Moon meets particular criteria.

A couple of weeks ago a brewer who used to work for a very large brewing company and now has started a very small one said, “Blue Moon might be the most important craft beer there’s been.” Read “Is Blue Moon craft?” and you’ll understand why.

In the half dozen years since I asked “Blue Moon: Peter, Paul & Mary or Trini Lopez?” craft beer sales have just about doubled (as have Blue Moon sales, in case you don’t consider them one in the same). I’m not sure how many million new drinkers that translates to, but a lot. Dave recognizes they’ve come for something new and leads us to a conclusion that’s been drawn before, but not as succinctly.

Of course, like many things that are new, it will one day be old. It might gain big market saturation. But then, many brands that we now might consider craft will in turn suffer this once they gain widespread acceptance.

This last point is important. The criteria create a sector which by definition must remain dynamic. Reinvention and a need to innovate and react is essential. A point that is not made explicit, but is inextricably implicit.

I’m a fan of reinvention and innovation. But given that I was once new, that now that I am old, and also that I like beers that are no longer new, I’m not sure I find this last thought all that cheery.

Bad beer and who should be talking about it

You connect the dots.

The conversation

John Harris, whose Ecliptic Brewing should be serving beer soon, was talking about the first months at Deschutes Brewery in 1988, where he wrote the initial recipes and brewed for four years. Batch after batch of beer tasted sour, and he dumped each one. It turned out that there was a design/construction flaw. Fixing that solved the problem.

“These days we could probably have saved the (sour) beer and made money on it.”

He laughed, but he was serious.

The story

Joe Stange’s DRAFT magazine story I mentioned a while back later came on line, leading to discussion here and there, particularly interesting here, about how many breweries is too many breweries. Beyond the matter of variety discussed first time around, there is the one about quality.

“What the industry is afraid of is low quality, and that will taint the quality of craft beer overall,” says Jeff Schrag, owner of Mother’s Brewing, a regional microbrewery that opened in 2011 in Springfield, Mo. “But I don’t know,” he adds, looking thoughtful. “There’s a lot of beer now that’s tainting the image of craft beer.”

Some links

– Brian Yaeger riffs on this at The New School in a post titled, “95% a-hole free?” . . . as opposed to the good old “asshole free” days.

It’s not like this is new. Consider what Ken Grossman had to say in 1981 in Zymurgy magazine (summarized by Maureen Ogle in Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer): “More often than not, he complained, homebrewers tried to go commercial ‘on a shoestring, and with such low technology and understanding of producing a high quality beer’ that they produced foul swill.”

That might come across as a little chippy. Would it be better to be specific, to name names? Last week Charlie Bamforth, the Anheuser-Busch endowed Professor of Brewing Science a the University of California at Davis, was in St. Louis. He spoke a few minutes at a Master Brewers Association of the Americas (MBAA) gathering. I’m told that “back in the day” almost everybody at these meetings worked at Anheuser-Busch and wore a tie. A lot more beards these days. Plenty of young faces, including many people who work at the ABI pilot brewery and students in a brewing class at Washington University. Bamforth was as entertaining as always, shifting quickly from one topic to another. At one point, and I’m not exactly sure why, he said, and I must paraphrase, one thing he can’t abide by is one brewer talking bad about another. So that’s something you learn in beer school.

– Brandon Hernandez pokes a hornet’s nest with “Truth in beer reporting and other novel concepts.”

Yes, the fact that Hernandez derives income from Stone Brewing Co. (as a communications specialist) muddies the water, but lots of interesting insights in the comments. And you’ll want to read what another panelist had to say, and then Alan McLeod’s take.

– Boak & Bailey, starting from an entirely different place (a post by Adrian Tierney-Jones), ask a question: End of the Kid Gloves Era? Maybe this is inside baseball (or cricket), just writers talking to writers, but consider this: “Perhaps it is time for beer writers to accept that conflict with ‘the industry’ is necessary and desirable.”

That way the brewers don’t have to be the a-holes.

Orval, Nova Scotia, spruce beer

I’d argue that Orval qualifies as a beer “from a place.”

I think this mysterious spruce beer that James Robertson wrote about in 1978 probably did as well. This is his entry for Orval from The Great American Beer Book (pages 223-224):

Brasserie D’Orval

ORVAL ABBEY’S ALE BIERE LUXE – dark orange foamy appearance, soapy-sweet malt aroma, intense resinous aromatic flavor that fills the senses, sharp and sweet. This reminds me of a highly alcoholic spruce beer, which is definitely an acquired taste. Years ago an Englishman named Charlie Grimes used to make this in the little French seaside village of River Bourgeoise in Nova Scotia. It was very popular and reputed to have once put the local parish priest back on his feet when he was near death from the flu. I like it, but as I said, it is very much an acquired taste. it is doubtful if Orval can be found outside of Belgium. This beer is made by the Trappist fathers and is considered to be one of Belgium’s classics.

That’s more than Michael Jackson wrote about Orval in 1977 in The World Guide to Beer: “In its skittle-shaped bottle, the distinctive and vigorously-hopped Orval beer is another of Belgium’s classics.”

It wasn’t much later that Merchant du Vin began importing Orval.

When beer worlds collide, or don’t

Beer menu at Gramophone in St. Louis

Really?

A bar manager at a gastropub begins a column in the Burlington Free Press with a story about sneaking in and out of a liquor store to buy a six-pack of Red Dog. I didn’t know that MillerCoors still made Red Dog, but then that’s not the point of “Remember when beer was fun?”

Instead Jeff Baker describes a place where I would have no interest in drinking.

There’s been a weird movement in the craft beer world that’s polarizing the beer scene: If you like craft beer then you must hate macro-beer. If you like macro-beer then you’re not one of us; you’re just a poser or at best an ignorant neophyte.

Is this really happening in Vermont? I don’t think Greg Noonan would approve. In fact, Baker doesn’t seem to be focusing on Vermont.

I see this blind us-against-them attitude expressed frequently online and mostly by the “fans” of craft beer. These Craft Beer Crusaders troll the forums of BeerAdvocate.com and Ratebeer.com, lambasting anything that isn’t craft, micro or nano.

The ramifications?

How did craft beer end up on this dead-end road to self-destruction? All this anger, all this negativity is going to destroy the movement and only serves to delegitimize the cause of brewing beer with flavor.

Again, really? This is not my beer world, although lord knows I am by almost any definition a beer geek. Saturday we paid $50 a ticket to attend the Midwest Belgian Beer Festival, one of the events that kicked off St. Louis Craft Beer Week. Granted, it costs about that much to park for two hours in New York City, but that price caused considerable discussion here in the Midwest. It turned out to be a deal.

More typical were the two evenings before. Friday we had dinner at 5 Star Burgers, which keeps about a half dozen beers from small St. Louis-area breweries on tap as well as selling wine and cocktails. The two young women (best guess later 20s or early 30s, although when you get to be as old as me guessing gets tougher) at the table next to us were both drinking beer.

Thursday we went to see Kermit Ruffins and the BBQ Swingers at the Gramophone. That’s part of the bottle beer list at the top of this post (draft list here). Waiting for Ruffins to go on Daria and I were both drinking 4 Hands Brewing’s Prussia when I noticed that the woman wearing a “Free Sean Payton” (did I mention Ruffins draws a NOLA friendly crowd?) was drinking Urban Chestnut Schnickelfritz from a bottle. The man she was with had a tall can of Busch, and the man they were talking to was holding a cocktail. Ruffins spent a good portion of the show with his trumpet in one had and a Bud Light bottle in the other.

Works for me. We can’t find beer we want to drink everywhere, but it’s dang close (you’d be surprised as the variety at Busch Stadium). So it seems fair to me that a Busch or a Red Dog drinker is entitled to the same.

How much is too much variety?

Musing, ala pigJoe Stange tackles the how many are too many breweries question in the latest issue of DRAFT magazine (July-August).

Yes, the topic has been talked to death (the Time and Denver Post – ‘Why can’t there be a brewery on every corner?’ – summaries will get you caught up if you’ve been in the south of France drinking wine the last few years). But Joe gives us more to think about.

. . . and variety—not quality—might be the real secret to craft beer’s recent success.

If that’s true does it mean the real question(s) might be is there such a such as too much variety? and if so, how much is too much?

My guess is “yes” and “we don’t know yet.”