This tiny room next to the kiln where hop farmer Brent McGlashen sleeps during harvest season. See explanation below.
The sale of Lazy Magnolia, the first packaging brewery in Mississippi, was announced last week. These things happen. Look at the list of “21 iconic breweries” below and count how many are run by their founders.
At some point breweries become “too big to fail.” They aren’t going to simply disappear. But there are thousands of smaller ones and eventually there must be a change. The kids inherit the place or a new owner takes charge or, in fact, they simply disappear.
I’m making no predictions about what happens next at Lazy Magnolia, if the new owners really will take “the brewery to new heights while maintaining its community roots.”
Lazy Magnolia opened in 2005, the same year at Ballast Point, Captain Lawrence, Dry Dock and 23 other microbreweries. Eighty breweries, 18 microbreweries and 62 brewpubs, closed that year. Put another way, 72 breweries came, 80 went and 1,310 remained the same.
In 2005, Boston Beer sold almost 20 percent of what the Brewers Association classified as craft beer and the 50 largest breweries almost 80 percent. In 2021, Boston Beer sold 7.3 percent of “craft beer” and the 50 largest breweries 50 percent.
Of course Lazy Magnolia had a story to tell. Leslie Henderson gave her husband, Mark, a homebrew kit for Christmas about 2000 or so. She ended up being the brewmaster. Hurricane Katrina shut down the brewery in 2006, but they survived. Their Southern Pecan Nut Brown Ale is made with whole roasted pecans and gets regular Untappd checkins from all over the American South.
Lazy Magnolia brewed 14,508 barrels of beer in 2012, but business had already begun to falter before the pandemic. They produced 11,450 in 2017 and 7,392 in 2021.
The brewery is one data point among thousands, but those thousands are the ones to watch when talking about the future of locally brewed beer.
In Kansas, small town means small
The “transformational potential of a small-town brewery” is particularly evident at The Farm & the Odd Fellows in Minneapolis (a town in Iowa). “The Swishers are rural Kansas natives who met at Bethany College in Lindsborg, moved away and boomeranged back to central Kansas in 2009. They have two kids and are both medical professionals by trade. Keir is an ER doctor in Salina, about 20 miles south of Minneapolis. Ashley is a dentist who bought a dental practice in downtown Minneapolis in 2010.
“Roughly 70% of Ashley’s patients come from out of town, and many of them are undergoing sedation during their visits. ‘If you’re getting a root canal or a crown, your driver is going to have a couple hours to kill while waiting for you,’ Keir said. ‘And there wasn’t a lot to do, or eat or drink in Minneapolis. So in 2019 we thought, why not buy this old building and figure out something to do with it for the community?'”
Lists
– 21 most iconic American breweries. Boston Beer is the only one on the list you’d call lager-centric. Just an observation. By chance, you can read more list-member Allagash here./a>
– 8 of the best beer cities around the world. Not everybody will agree with the two US choices, Portland (Maine, that is) and Denver. And a note about the Denver entry – Black Project closed last September.
Festivals
– Clear Beer Fest. Just what it says. How’s that for transparency?
– The Freshtival 2023. All of the beer poured will be less than 7 days old.
Good listening
Hosting an All About Beer podcast focused on hops grown in New Zealand, Em Sauter and Don Tse began by thanking Brent McGlashen of Mac Hops for being up at 7 a.m. New Zealand time to talk with him. I had to laugh, because by his own account McGlashen doesn’t sleep much.
And he sleeps even less during harvest, which just wrapped up. Most nights his young children come tuck him in before going to bed (their house is nearby). He might sleep two hours in the tiny room (pictured at the top) next to the kiln that runs 24 hours a day during harvest.
Mac Hops is by no means a tiny operation, but, as you can see, is still hands on. I’ll be writing a bit about New Zealand hops in the next Hop Queries newsletter as well as elsewhere . . . likely for the next several months.
Really good stuff I read this week
They have nothing to do with beer, but they have something to do with how we think about new things (which might include beer). And how we think about writing about beer.
– The curious love affair between Jason Isbell and America’s sportswriters
– Is Ashely Nicole Moss the future of sports journalism?
Because this.
“But maybe, just maybe, I’m old as fuck. Maybe I’m a dinosaur who needs to accept that times (and approaches) have changed. Maybe my way isn’t the only way. Maybe my way isn’t even the right way.”
Cue (or queue) up Jason Isbell’s “Maybe It’s Time.”