TWTBWTW: What comes before huge?

Barley growing at Wheatland Farm + Brewery

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?

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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.

TWTBWTW: The non-terroir edition*

Another long holiday weekend (Father’s Day followed by Juneteenth), and another Monday with links and (almost) nothing but.

De-Platformed: How the Local Brewery Built on Community and Experimentation Lost Its Way in Scaling Up and Selling Out
“It’s always a little bitter to see something that seemed to have such a great concept and so much potential at the beginning fall apart. If it had stayed small and focused on quality and just maintained what made it cool to begin with, then we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.”

Creating Safer Spaces in Craft Beer, Part One — Why Isn’t Craft Beer More Diverse? Part two posts today.

Don’t Roll Up – Queue Up. Pub etiquette.

Britain’s Cask Ale Is Struggling. Is American-Style Craft Beer to Blame?

From shrinkflation to ‘drinkflation’: Alcohol reduced to ensure prices remain static.

The grim truths behind Big Beer’s American heartland fetish.

Beer for elephants: a visit to Okavango Craft Brewery in Botswana.

Taking mass market lagers seriously.

Special No More: A Eulogy For Anchor’s Our Special Ale.

Boundary-breaking craft beer Instagram accounts to follow.

* Almost non-terroir edition, I guess. Because I really did enjoy this cartoon. To understand why, click on the image.

There is such a thing as terroir in beer

Sun setting over estate grown barley at Wheatland Spring Farm+BrewerySun setting over field of barley at Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery

[Begin disclosure] I once owned the domain name beerterroir.com. Like a dozen other urls I paid rent on it a few years before I let it disappear into a distant corner of the internet. It’s available, should you want to claim it.

I registered it in 2006, only hours after Sam Calagione made fun of the word terroir in his Craft Brewers Conference keynote. (More on that in a moment.) But I wasn’t inclined to use the word as it relates to beer in a sentence. I understood it was (and is) considered a “wine word” and even so writer Jamie Goode described the concept in wine as “blindingly obvious and hotly controversial.”

I became more comfortable with the word as I researched “For the Love of Hops” and continued with “Brewing Local,” although I continue to prefer “taste of place.”

Amy Trubek concludes “The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey Into Terroir,” an absolutely terrific book, by writing “ . . . the taste of place exists, as long as it matters.” To repeat myself, I’m more inclined to use the words taste of place opposed to terroir, but I’m fine with “beer terroir exists, as long as it matters.” Both matter to me.

Friday I moderated a panel discussion about these and other related topics held in a barn on Wheatland Spring Farm + Brewery in Virginia along with a winemaker/grape grower, a cidermaker, a James Beard award winning chef, and a brewer/farmer. I am invested, and that bias informs how I think about terroir. [end disclosure]

Which brings us to Monday morning. Right after I posted TWTBWTW I opened my feed reader and saw the headline, “There is No Such Thing as Terroir in Beer.” I looked at the list of things I intended to have done by the end of the day and thought, “No time for this.” Remember, though, I’m invested. I wanted people to read the story, because I am happy when they give terroir or taste of place some thought, even when I don’t agree.

That’s why I posted a link on Twitter. I already knew I was going to write something like this when I had time, but I included the briefest summary possible of what I thought of the headline: “Wrong.” I guess Matt Curtis, who wrote the story, was offended. He called this a “tad unprofessional.” Perhaps I should have typed, “Disagree.” Anyway, he also asked “Why?”

So here goes. Bullet points, because otherwise . . . The first chapter of “Brewing Local” is about “beer from a place” and runs about 8,000 words. And a recent Hop Queries contained more than 2,500 words on hop terroir itself.

– “Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle,” Pierre Larousse’s nineteenth century French dictionary, defines terroir as “the earth considered from the point of view of agriculture.” It describes le goût de terroir as “the flavor or odor of certain locales that are given to its products, particularly with wine.”

– Trubek prefers what she calls the “French foodview,” arguing that in France the narrow scientific and broad cultural definitions of terroir are often used simultaneously. “This broader definition of terroir considers place as much as earth. According to this definition, the people involved in making wine, the winemaking tradition of a region, and the local philosophy of flavor are all part of terroir,” she wrote. “Unlike the narrow view of terroir, this humanist point of view is not really quantifiable. Terroir speaks of nature and nature’s influence on flavor and quality, but here the human attributes we bring to ‘nature’ are cultural and sensual rather than objective and scientific.”

– There is real science behind terroir, although that doesn’t have to limit how we think about it. Here’s an example I use all the time, from geneticist John Henning at the United States Department of Agriculture research facility in Oregon. Environment and epigenetics combine to make hops from a particular area unique. All plant species have methylated DNA, which causes some genes to be “switched on” more easily than others.

Differences in soil, day length, temperatures, amount of rainfall, and terrain all may influence the methylation process. The underlying DNA does not change, but the methylation pattern can be different, resulting in differing concentrations of the chemical compounds produced by the plant.

– At Freestyle Hops in New Zealand, they draw a distinction between this science of terroir and what they call “terroir expression.” It mirrors Trubek’s French foodview. The expression is a combination of the environmental factors, cultural practices, the operating processes and the individual people at the farm who create the flavor of their hops. CEO Dave Dunbar says, basically, that New Zealand has a unique terroir (blame a nearby hole in the ozone if you want) for hops, a good thing, and that Freestyle seeks to build on that, to create a better thing.

– As promised, from Calagione’s 2006 keynote: “If you can’t blind them with science, blind them with geography. Je parl francais en peu, and I’m pretty sure the translated definition of terroir is ‘dirt’. The wine world has wrapped this one word with mighty voodoo powers and created a cult of exclusivity around it. Breweries have terroir as well. But instead of revolving around a patch of land, ours are centered on a group of people.”

– In the penultimate paragraph (you know, the one in which Wallace or Stringer Bell dies) of “No Such Thing” Curtis writes, “I accept that you could produce a beer using ingredients grown on a single farm, brewed with the same untreated well water that was also used to irrigate the hops and barley used in its production, and fermented only with the yeast airborne above those same fields. You could even take this a step further and not boil it, creating a ‘raw’ beer, further removing the human element that takes the nature of a beer away from the land on which it was born. I believe there is a future for a small amount of beer to be produced in this way, even if this method is as challenging as it is commercially unviable. Yes, you can connect beer to its agriculture and its seasonality, but this is not the same as its flavour being a direct expression ‘of the earth’.”

– That seems like a limited view to me, based on a narrow definition. In my view, beer does not reflect its terroir by accident. Brewers matter. Different beers at Wheatland Spring taste of the 30 acres the farm sits on in different ways. They are all brewed with the same intention, to connect the land and the beer.

They are made with the same well water. Some are fermented with wild yeast collected on the property. Some are brewed only with estate grains, some include grains from nearby. There will be more. Saturday, Nicholas Santantonio, the breeder at Virginia Tech, grabbed spikes off experimental plants Wheatland Spring is trialing and talked about their most important attributes. They are better suited to grow in the region and they deliver unique, desirable flavors.

– I have, somewhat by chance, tasted batches 1, 2 and 4 of Wheatland Spring Estate Return, brewed with estate barley. They taste of the same, but not exactly the same as each other. Also not quite like any other beer. Trubek once shared an office at the New England Culinary Institute with Mark Davis, a teacher and trained wine sommelier. He told her, “Terroir is character. It is the triumph of diversity over homogeneity.”

Saturday, I saw the genesis of more of that in the test plots at Wheatland Spring.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“No Such Thing” concludes, “Although, I still believe in the potential for beer to truly express a sense of place, but maybe that place isn’t a field, or an orchard, or a hillside. Maybe, that place is one with dark wooden furniture, and a deeply worn, patterned carpet. One soundtracked by the hum of gentle chatter, and a friendly face behind the bar that asks the question ‘same again?’ If beer is expressive of anything, then this expression is found, not where it is grown or made, but where it is served, and this, surely, is what makes it so special.”

This expansive view of terroir or taste of place mirrors one put forth in “Beer Places: The Microgeographies of Craft Beer.” The book is a collection of essays, mostly by academics, and contains phrases like “banal authenticity” and “spatial politics” that are at least as hard as terroir to wrap your head around.

The authors of the introduction write, “The taste of place refers to the unique flavors and experience of each beer, and how these embody the webs of ingredients, social networks, and layers of place that converge on the production and consumption of craft beer.”

“Webs of ingredients” does not seem to acknowledge the role agriculture plays in taste of place as much as I’d like. But that’s not something I intend to take up on Twitter. The fiery conversations that “No Such Thing” ignited are still burning bright and I have no interest in participating.

What to read after recovering from shocking Anchor Christmas Ale/Steam news

Vintage Anchor Christmas Ales

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.

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This week’s TWTBWTW theme: Drinking in place

Welcome strange to the Rainbow  Bar

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.”

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

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Introducing “Hazy.”