TWTBWTW: A beer business story & a culture war

Miller High Life cans seized by French officials, defending the Champagne domain

Even the Wall Street Journal ran a story about and photo (credit to Associated Press) of cans of Miller High Life – “the Champagne of Beers” – being destroyed because only sparkling wines made in France’s Champagne region can use the name on their labels, according to French laws.

It would seem that beer still holds some cultural cachet.

You might also enjoy (or read without enjoyment in the case of the first one):

– “The controversy surrounding Bud Light is a business story, but one caught in the midst of a culture war.”
This is one of those just go read the dang thing stories. Because . . . “When trans professionals leave careers they enjoy, it not only sets them back professionally but negatively affects the rest of the workforce. This is because people’s biases tend to soften upon developing a close relationship with a member of a marginalized group. It’s why the ‘coming out’ movement is widely credited with advancing marriage equality and other gay rights. Over the course of just two decades, millions of people in the U.S. realized that they had LGBTQ+ siblings, parents, friends, cousins, teachers, and roommates.”

– Do Wild Ales Have a Marketing Problem?
Within the story, Stephanie Grant writes that every person she talked to while reporting it said these beers aren’t meant to be popular. “It’s a long game, for sure,” Lisa Boldt at Primitive Ales in Colorado told her. “It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme by any means.”

– Speaking of mixed cultures . . .
Launched in 2014 by Yumi Shimada, Maíra Kimura, and Fernanda Ueno, craft brewery Japas Cervejaria combines the cofounders’ Brazilian and Japanese heritages. They are brewing and selling their beers in both Brazil and the United States.

– Innovation I
Freeze-dried beer is not new, but Klosterbrauerei Neuzelle managing director Stefan Fritsche says this German version will revolutionize the brewing industry.

– Innovation IIBack in 2009, when the beer blogosphere was broader, this statement from Ron Pattinson led to several other posts about what qualifies as innovation: “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t want innovative beer. . . . Worshipping at the alter of brewers’ egos. It’s not for me. I want something to drink, something that lifts my spirits and makes my heart soar. And, in sufficient quantities, will get me pissed. It’s really not complicated.”

I thought about this last week when I posted what Bart Watson said about craft reinventing itself. As Watson made clear, it is brewers intent on distributing their beer that face the biggest challenges. It becomes a business story, which Jeff Alworth addresses, headlining the post “Structural innovations.”

I chose the pieces of the some-assembly-required post Friday because I was thinking about the power of making connections. It is the super strength of breweries that make their businesseses work without the advantages that come with economies of scale. May not scream innovative, but it works.

Is the (beer) glass half empty or half full?

Half empty or half full?

Chances are that I could plug these elements into an AI tool and generate a blog post. Instead, I am going to leave it to you — not to hand it off to AI, but to assemble it yourself.

1) “To grow again craft is going to have to find incremental opportunities, that’s in terms of both the beers that people make and the occasions customers are looking for in general,” Brewers Association chief economist Bart Watson said during an online press conference following the release of the BA’s annual Craft Beer Production Report.

2) Answering a question about what’s ahead, he said, “Craft is going to have to, as it always has done, reinvent itself for the next generation of drinkers . . . (brewers) will have to find ways to welcome new people into the category.”

3) In 1950, the 10 largest brewing companies in the United State produced 38% of beer. In 1960, that had grown to 52%. In 1970, they made 69%, and in 1980 93%.

4) Twenty years ago the 50 top domestics craft brewing companies produced 78% of (BA-defined) craft beer. Ten years ago, the top 50 brewed 70%. In 2021 (the 2022 figures are still being calculated) that was down to 50%.

5) Stubborn German Brewing in Waterloo, Illinois, population 11,062, is one of those 9,000-plus not-top-50 breweries. They brewed 430 barrels in 2021. They are one of two breweries located on the town square, directly across from the Monroe County Courthouse. It is about a 25-mile drive to Anheuser-Busch’s flagship brewery in St. Louis. Here is a Facebook post from earlier in the week (click to expand).

TWTBWTW: The ugly, the bad & the good

Thank you, craft beer breweries, for making my drinking problem seem like a neat hobby

Ugly is ugly, but somehow we look past that. I thought about this last week reading a profile of Bill Hader written as part of the runup to the last season of “Barry.” About how there can be things that constantly get us in trouble, that we don’t like, and what we can change.

And still lingering in my head from the previous week is something author Stephen Deusner had to say about Jason Isbell:

“I think he really picked up a lot from them about how to write about the South, and how to position yourself as somebody who loves the place, and yet finds so much about it that’s ugly. He even told me it was Patterson [Hood] and [Mike] Cooley that showed him it was possible to be bitter about where you came from and still love the place.”

Each week there are stories that reinforce the myth that there is a halo 'round the craft beer moon. And there are stories that scream bullshit. There are more of the former, maybe because they are more fun to write.

In my youth I worked at a newspaper where the publisher said, honest to goodness, that if we wrote something bad about a person we should find an occasion to write something good about them within the next year. Some sort of balanced ledger. It’s not my goal to find less pleasant stories to balance the feel good ones, but some weeks that is pretty easy.

One of the reasons there is a halo around what some call craft beer is the promise of change. That requires paying attention to things that should change. So paying attention . . .

Unionizing a Craft Brewery Shouldn’t Be This Hard. And why would workers even want a union? Glad you asked. After this story, go on to the next one.

One hundred percent burnout. “Based on results we’ve seen within other industries, the data indicates serious issues specific to craft beer at play.”

Burnout and Allyship in Beer DEI. “DEI has gone from being the hot new poster-topic to the we-have-to-tick-this-box-or-we’re-in-trouble essential to fall off a cliff into the oh-god-can-we-shut-up-about-this-now burnout territory over the last decade, and right now we are at the bottom of that cliff, with those of us who still give a shit screaming at the top of our lungs but no one is listening anymore.”

On the flipside. Stories that former publisher would want to read.

One year later with Funkytown Brewery. This Black-owned brewery now has more than 500 accounts in the Chicago and Milwaukee metropolitan areas. Many of those places are near communities that are “underserved by the craft beer industry.”

Be as into beer as you need to be. “Talking about beer beats talking about the weather, or football, or wallowing in the grim state of politics.” To which I would add, at least it should.

Four days, two baseball games, five sandwiches, 10 beer bars. “May all your days be equally full of good gustation and convivial company as mine turned out to be.”

The Heineken effect

Seen during our travels the past year.

Lagunitas IPA in Nafplion, Greece

Nafplion, Greece.

On tap in Waitoma, New Zealand

Waitomo, New Zealand.

This doesn’t happen if Heineken did not own Lagunitas Brewing. Meanwhile, Heineken is not sold at either of these places.

Beer aroma pools

Yellowstone National Park

Imagine hiking in the mountains of wherever, emerging from a stand of trees and seeing a half dozen pools on the flat rock surface ahead. And that the smell that filled the air was just like your favorite beer.

Yet when you sidle up to them individually, getting close enough to sort out what each of them contributed on their own it is obvious they are unique.

Might you call them beer aroma pools?

Randy Mosher introduces this idea—that is aroma pools, sans the mountains—in the current (Spring 2023) issue of Craft Beer & Brewing. The inspiration comes from a research article with the roll-off-your-tongue title of “A New Classification of Perceptual Interactions between Odorants to Interpret Complex Aroma Systems. Application to Wine Aroma.” You may download it here, but I recommend skipping directly to Mosher’s beer version.

Let’s start with the odor activity value (OAV), which you might recall is discussed in “For the Love of Hops.” The OVA equals one when the threshold of detection of a compound is equal to the quantity present.

In the wine study, researchers blended single chemical compounds to create a model wine aroma. They then began removing them to determine which ones really matter. The model included 14 ethyl esters, only six of which had an OAV greater than 1. They were able to remove every ester except one and still maintain the same fruity character as long as they increased the quantity to match the original intensity.

Mosher writes, “As a group, the esters were so resilient that scientists termed them a ‘buffer.’ Even though many of the original esters were far below threshold values, they were strongly interacting—demonstrating superadditivity, a kind of synergy.”

He asks, “Is beer odor structured similarly?” The answer is yes, and he makes the case. So I suggest you track down a copy of the magazine. As you might expect, Mosher has also created lovely diagrams of how to think about both wine aroma pools and beer aroma pools.

You can find it here, or subscribe.

A bit of a disclosure. I occasionally write (and thus am paid by) Craft Beer & Brewing. I write about hops regularly for Brewing Industry Guide, which is produced by CB&B.