The Beer Industry: A Tale of Triumph, Defeat, Economics, and Inebriation

Blogging on my other site, the Boston Beer Club page, has recently brought me face-to-face with my interest in craft beer. In this, I am far from being alone. I remember reading one blog that had been around for a while which predicted a sharp increase in the number of beer blogs that are created and are posted on regularly. After making this prediction, he stated that his hypothesis was semi-correct, with only a slight rise in the amount of beer blogging this year. While I've been drinking craft beer for years (albeit, without realizing or appreciating it,) there are several things about the beer industry which really draw me in.

First, it is full of extremely passionate individuals. Take, for example, what appears to be an ongoing dispute between two of the nations most reputable craft breweries - Dogfish Head and Brooklyn. In a recent article published in The New Yorker (which you can find linked in my Dogfish Head Brand X article,) the debate was posed between brewmasters Sam Calagione of DFH and Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn regarding a term coined by Jim Koch - Extreme Beer. This discussion boils over past superficial beer-geekdom past the now painful terms of "macro" versus "micro" into the realm of phrases like "industrial beer." The core of this tension lies at the underlying philosophies, not to mention lifestyles, of both individuals. Dogfish Head is portrayed as the Apple Computers of beer, with Sam providing a very unique creative vision to the driving force that is Bryan Selders much in a way similar to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, or perhaps you prefer Lennon and McCartney. I've always been a firm believer in the creative fusion two gifted people, I can attribute it to my background in politics and philosophy, and it is almost "empowering," for lack of a better term, to see this at work. Returning to the subject, Dogfish Head has always taken risks, and pushes the envelope more than any craft brewery of its size. Indeed, the same New Yorker article states that DFH boasts more "Extreme Beers" of any brewery in the world with beers like Fort, World Wide Stout, and 120 Minute IPA all reaching upwards of 18% ABV. For Sam, "Extreme Beer" is a form of expression to an individual who finds anything with an audience to be legit. Garrett Oliver, on the other hand, finds the term to be counterintuitive. Oliver, who, as I've read from many sources, is a beacon of unique classiness. He makes a point to dress up for beer related events, dinners, and functions and states, through interviews and publications, his dedication to the craft brewing explosion. Beneath it all, Oliver and Sam want the same thing, they just differ on the route to get there. Predictably, Sam's approach has less tact while sporting an unusually wide range of creativity. Rather than using outright brute force on your palate, DFH brews beer that is interesting enough to continue garnering wider audiences. In Sam's world, extreme beer will slowly creep across the nation and eventually take hold through sheer variety. On the other hand, Garrett's approach appears much more cunning and strategic: in his plan, beer wouldn't have any inflammatory rhetoric, indeed using much of the same as the more well-known breweries, and infiltrate and conquer from within. This seems to be the opposite of Sam's characterization of Budweiser's American Ale, where AB-Inbev uses "culture vulture" tactics to hijack the craft beer explosion while simultaneously speaking ill of dark beers and/or different beers - "Beer Racism" as Sam states. Regardless, Oliver believes terms like "Extreme Beer" drive people away and further enforce stereotypes about the difference between beer and wine, for example, at the dinner table. As someone who has authored a book and several articles on the subject, Oliver has become intimately familiar with the now difficult decision of what beverage to serve at the dinner table; those most holy shrines of the modern suburban family. Ultimately, both individuals have an extreme passion for beer and stand united on core values while divided by tactics.

Secondly, each brewer is able to make their own unique "fingerprint" on the beer world. In this age where most everything is democratized - freedom of thought, freedom to choose a career path, freedom to try new things - similarly, each individual can use whatever means they would like to get to the end product: beer. From DFH's crazy marketing ploys to the antiquated breweries of belgium that have adhered to the Beer Purity Law of the 16th century, each can choose from an almost infinite amount of variables to brew their own beer. Contrary to what most people think, achieving consistency in a beer may be one of the most difficult aspects of brewing. From a beer geek's perspective, this is why there can be so much respect attributed to what Founders Brewery calls the "Mainstream Shooby Dooers;" Bud, Miller, and Coors - whenever you walk into a store with a mind to buy any of those brands, you always get a similar product despite how much beer they brew. If any of you have surfed the BeerAdvocate forums, I would say that about 20% of the total discussion that occurs is comparing a beer from year-to-year. The most hands-on example of this I can relate to is my review of Southern Tier's Choklat Imperial Stout. Shortly after reviewing the beer, I logged on to BeerAdvocate to find a thread regarding differences between the 2008 Choklat and the 2007 beer of the same namesake. One user complained about this year's batch not being as "thick" in the mouthfeel of the beer, and too "hot"- a term that's generally used to describe a lack of properly concealing alcohol content when the beer is obviously attempting to. Other users either agreed or disagreed accordingly with the bottom line being that beer is still a beverage produced "organically," and thus subject to inconsistencies. Yeast - not hops or malt - is the engine in the beer-as-car metaphor; it is ultimately responsible for any motion that occurs. Because yeast is a living organism, it is always subject to some uncertainty and inconsistency even in this era of scientific enlightenment. Every yeast has been analyzed and is known to behave differently at varying temperatures and can be thought to have a reasonable "ballpark" range of certainty with regards to fermentation. To make matters more complicated, breweries often use different types of secondary fermentation including "bottle conditioning" - a frequently used technique where the secondary fermentation of the beer occurs in the bottle on store shelves. Beer that is bottle conditioned is frequently better served for aging as the beer may "mature" over a span of time. The best styles for cellaring are Lambics, which use a different type of yeast that "spontaneously ferments" the beer, high ABV stouts, barleywines, old ales, strong ales, and any other ale that exhibits a certain degree of malt complexity that can persevere after the hops fade away. This also says nothing of the belgian style ales that frequently use tertiary and beyond fermentation cycles. For those of you that aren't that familiar with beer, the term "Double," when applied to beer (for example, Stone's Double Bastard, Rogue's I2PA Double IPA - or higher, think Chimay Tripel or Three Philosophers Quadrupel) refers to the amount of fermentation cycles a beer has. All this combines to make beer a completely unique experience, almost every time! Think of it this way: you just returned from the store with a six pack of your favorite craft beer, let's say something like Sam Adams Boston Lager or Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. You buy this "old standby" beer because it's something familiar to you and you can enjoy one just about any time and place without needing an occasion, unlike that bottle of Deschutes Abyss you have in a dark corner of your basement. There is almost the same amount of effort that goes into ensuring the consistency of the taste on behalf of Sierra Nevada or the Boston Beer Company as Deschutes puts into their annual batch of Abyss. Albeit a bottle of Sam Adams Boston Lager or The Abyss... you're never tasting the same beer year-to-year.

The beer industry is interesting because everyone likes an underdog story. The chimerical goliath that is Miller, Bud, Coors is the bane of most craft brewery's existence. For those of us living in areas very conducive to beer geekdom, such as Boston, it's easy to find places where people only come either for the crowd or for the wide beer selection such as Deep Ellum or Publick House - RFD in Washington D.C. - HopCat in Grand Rapids, MI - The Tap Room in Grosse Point, MI. These places ally themselves with craft breweries in an attempt to load David's slingshot for that one perfect shot that'll fell the great beast. BeerAdvocate website enforces their policy of respect beer, even when discussions regarding how "low quality" that American behemoth's beer is devolve into yelling matches or outright "flaming" (to use a forum term)- the most entertaining being between those Stella Artois fans and Bud drinkers who have yet to realize their both drinking the same company's beer. What most BeerAdvocate members are griping about in the long run is the influence of capitalism on beer. Their main argument: Bud, Miller, and Coors doesn't respect beer; they only brew to turn a profit as evidenced by their huge corporations. Craft breweries are of the mind, for the most part, that competition among "allies" is a good thing as long as its to the detriment of the enemy. However, competition is a double-edged sword. In our times of advancing technology, people long for simplicity. Everything from governmental policies to small-scale social problems long for a cooperative solution where all entities can compete for the good of the whole. This form of neo-communitarianism (I'm going to avoid using those words which ignite others so in communism and socialism as they've become bastardized beyond their theoretical significance to have a highly negative connotation) can't exist under a society of such strict capitalism. Say Dogfish Head were to finally find the "golden bullet" beer that appeals to every crowd of beer drinkers and is hailed as an excellent beer world-wide. The temptation would be to take their recipe and expand so as to fell those foul American macro-breweries. Then what would they be? They would have become that thing they hate so, (notwithstanding Sam's crazy attention deficit neurotic push for variety in beer) and would be the new Bud, Miller, or Coors. They would obviously have to make the tough decision between being filthy rich and returning to a world where that temptation is left to the vast sea of craft breweries emerging in America. After all, who is to say that if DFH backs down, whether Bell's, Rogue, Sierra Nevada, Sam Adams, Founders, Alesmith, Russian River, Southern Tier, Stone, Brooklyn, Victory, Port Pizza, Deschutes, Three Floyds, Smuttynose, Goose Island, etc. (you get the picture) would take the torch and become a corporate monstrosity. I know this stands in stark opposition to the mission of most of these small craft breweries, but this age of capitalism makes craft brewing a game theoretic puzzle on a large scale - wouldn't you rather become the king given the chance because you'd be worried about someone else screwing things up? Another place I've heard this argument is among my single friends at the bar when they say, "if these girls are just looking to go home with some random sleaze ball for one night of fun, it might as well be me because I'm actually a decent human being" which is, for the most part, always a true and logical statement. But then again, who is to say that the smaller craft breweries aren't just killing each other if Garrett Oliver is right and 90% of beer consumed in the United States is Bud, Miller, or Coors? It just makes you wonder.

I see beer as embodying the soul of many nations, many lifestyles, and many situations both good and bad. It can simultaneously embody the ambition of an entrepreneur such as Sam Calagione and the profit driven capitalist character of Bud, Miller, or Coors. A good mid-point is Jim Koch, who sells more craft beer than anyone in the world. He is at least partly responsible for the revolution in craft brewing due to his ad campaigns which stress the care they take with the various ingredients in each and every batch of beer brewed which, in turn, sparked those big corporate brewers to begin using the terms "hops, malt, and yeast" in their commercials as opposed to goofy situations mimicking the latest Pepsi ad campaigns. While we in Boston are partial to our Sam Adams, I can see the cross-over between commercialism and craft brewing that was so expertly engineered by Koch who, by all rights, should be revered as a genius of his trade. Sam Adams brews something for everyone (my favorite being their Holiday Porter) with 21 different varieties of beer including several extremely limited offerings such as Triple Bock, Utopias (the pioneer "extreme" beer,) and MMM (Millennium.) With their new "Imperial Series" coming out soon, this truly cements Sam Adams as the bridge over the troubled waters that embody the strife between the beer-industrial complex and the world of craft breweries.

With that, I'll leave you for now, as I have other things to do; namely, prepare for a thesis meeting this afternoon.