{"id":15883,"date":"2020-02-17T07:13:03","date_gmt":"2020-02-17T13:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/?p=15883"},"modified":"2020-02-26T06:27:22","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T12:27:22","slug":"has-hard-seltzer-given-beer-the-cross-road-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/has-hard-seltzer-given-beer-the-cross-road-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"Has hard seltzer given beer the ‘Cross Road Blues?’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’ down
\nStandin’ at the crossroad, baby, eee-eee, risin’ sun goin’ down
\nI believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin’ down<\/em><\/p>\n

– From \u201cCross Road Blues\u201d by Robert Johnson<\/p>\n

Lew Bryson, bless his booming laugh, has written about the soul of beer<\/a>. In the first years I posted at Appellation Beer the tagline here read, \u201cIn search of the soul of beer.\u201d I had to lean on the Wayback Machine<\/a> to find a copy of the old logo.<\/p>\n

\"Appellation<\/p>\n

I changed the tag to \u201ccelebrating beer from a place\u201d because I thought it would result in fewer questions like \u201cwhy appellation?\u201d Also, a lengthy discussion here sometime later documents the sort of trouble a blogger can get into suggesting some beers might have soul<\/a> and others could be soulless.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Bryson writes<\/a>, \u201cThose pioneering beers were great because of the heart and soul of the people who made them. I don\u2019t want to see the soul go away. I don\u2019t think that the beer world as we know it today could survive that.\u201d
\n<\/p>\n

And, to get to the point, \u201cThe soul is at risk because craft brewing doesn\u2019t know what it means anymore, and it all comes down to hard seltzer.\u201d<\/p>\n

You really should give it a read, because I don\u2019t know where to stop quoting. This seems pretty important: \u201c[Hard seltzer] is not craft. It\u2019s fermenting sugar and adding flavor to a drink that has been stripped of all flavor.\u201d<\/p>\n

To this I would add something Tomme Arthur of Lost Abbey\/Port Brewing said during his keynote speech at the Brewbound Live conference a couple of months ago in California. \u201cThank god Seltzer has arrived and brought with it a stunning sense of terroir.<\/em> I don\u2019t know about you, but I for one can\u2019t wait to read stories about third generation dextrose farmers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two topics that always come up when I visit breweries these days are hard seltzer<\/em> and hop creep.<\/em> And, indicating some have been thinking long and hard about the things Bryson writes about, discussions about hard seltzer often include words like ethos<\/em> and soul.<\/em> <\/p>\n

Plenty of breweries have pivoted quickly and begun to produce hard seltzer. It\u2019s pretty obvious why. Last week, Brewbound reported<\/a> that financial services firm Credit Suisse predicts hard seltzer could grow to between 8 and 10% of total beer industry volume by 2023. And this has more than brewers concerned. Panelists at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in California earlier this month agreed the biggest threat to wine right now is hard seltzer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of us think of a 24-year-old drinking White Claw out on the beach or at a backyard barbecue,\u201d says Jordan Kivelstadt, founder of Kivelstadt Cellars, \u201cbut when you actually look at the demographics of hard seltzer, it\u2019s much broader. It\u2019s more affluent, it\u2019s college educated, and the age range is a lot wider\u201d than people assume.<\/p>\n

\"Scofflaw<\/p>\n

This hard seltzer variety pack recently showed up at our local Kroger. Scofflaw Brewing otherwise is known for a range of bold, in-your-face beers and its \u201ciconoclastic attitude.\u201d<\/a> The brewery is still pumping out excellent IPAs \u2014 IPA month began Saturday at Summits Wayside Taverns (the restaurants I wrote about at part of #FlagshipFebruary<\/a>) with 50 IPAs on tap and six of them are from Scofflaw \u2014 but it is a business in business to do business. And there is money to be made producing hard seltzer.<\/p>\n

How is this different than family friendly brewpubs producing (non-alcoholic) root beer for their under-21 customers? Than brewpubs stocking wine for their non-beer drinking customers? Or selling gluten-free beer made elsewhere? Again, read what Bryson writes<\/a> to the end.<\/em> He mentions several brewers, by name, as \u201cguardians of craft brewing\u2019s soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

I would suggest the thousands that sell their beer mostly to their neighbors are equally important. They\u2019ve established relationships with their customers that might make, in some case, producing hard seltzer seem perfectly reasonable. Personally, I don\u2019t care one way or the other about the fact that Scofflaw makes Southern Seltzer. I\u2019m still going to order the occasional pint of Basement IPA at Manuel\u2019s Tavern. On the other hand, if Jester King Brewery or Birds Fly South Ale Project or Halfway Crooks Beer were to start making hard seltzer I would feel like I had been lied to.<\/p>\n

At the wine conference, Kivelstadt pointed out one reason hard seltzer is having a moment is that people perceive it as a healthy alternative. Wine, he says, should promote that it is more natural and more authentic. \u201cWe take grapes that we grow in the earth and turn them into a product. As an industry we need to stand up and yell it from the rooftops. People want to know that [the food and drink] they are consuming came from a real place, so we have an opportunity to take this moment to define why wine is the best and most sustainable beverage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Make the right substitutions and that paragraph could be about beer from a place.<\/em> I\u2019d suggest such beers might have soul, but I\u2019ve already learned not everybody agrees<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’ down Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, eee-eee, risin’ sun goin’ down I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin’ down – From \u201cCross Road Blues\u201d by Robert Johnson Lew Bryson, bless his booming laugh, has written about the soul of beer. In the first years … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beers-of-conviction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wTn-48b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15883"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15910,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15883\/revisions\/15910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/appellationbeer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}