It was during that secularly sacred national coming-together known as the Super Bowl, where 30 seconds of advertising cost sponsors an average of $4.25 million. Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer, had that kind of money, and it hired advertising house Anomaly to help it train an especially snarky attack on craft beer. 

The commercial started with shots of A-B InBev’s breweries churning away. “Budweiser proudly a macro beer” appeared over the scenes as did the sentence, “It’s not to be fussed over.” Anyone in the know knew what was coming. Still, even 10 years on packs a marketing punch. 

“Fussed over” would be superimposed over the image of a bespectacled, bearded hipster — handlebar mustache included — leaning gravely over the rim of a bulbous glass filled with what looked like dark beer. Flash to another scene of equally earnest hipsters — flannels, cardigans, more eyewear — leaning over their own beers in what appeared to be a fashionable urban bar. “It’s brewed for drinking, not for dissecting” now appeared over the commercial. 

The commercial went on in that mocking vein for a full minute, ending with the kicker: “Let them sip their Pumpkin Peach Ale — we’ll be brewing us some golden suds.”

Reaction to the commercial was fast and furious — and not just from craft beer. “We believe each and every style of beer is worth fussing over,” A-B InBev archrival MillerCooers would tweet. Others were more blunt: “It’s a fuck you to Anheuser-Busch because they sent us a fuck you,” Bell’s founder Larry Bell would tell the Chicago Tribune in explaining his brewery’s limited Pumpkin Peach Ale release in response to the commercial. 

Plus, plenty of critics gleefully pointed out that A-B InBev had not even 10 days before the Super Bowl announced it was acquiring Elysian Brewing, a respected craft operation in Seattle that brewed a … wait for it … pumpkin peach ale.

Dick Cantwell, an Elysian founder who had opposed the sale, eviscerated the new corporate parent in a statement: “I find it kind of incredible that ABI would be so tone-deaf as to pretty directly (even if unwittingly) call out one of the breweries they have recently acquired, even as the brewery is dealing with the anger of the beer community in reaction to the sale.”

The spot remains a flashpoint for longtime craft beer fans, an easily recallable benchmark in the industry’s marketplace evolution. (They might not remember the exact year or the game itself, in which the Seattle Seahawks blew a comeback, down by four and deciding for some reason to pass on second and goal at the New England Patriots’ 1-yard line, only to see it intercepted.) 

The commercial probably couldn’t have come at any other moment than around 2015. Since craft beer first began eking out a market presence in the mid-1980s behind Samuel Adams Boston Lager and Pete’s Wicked Ale, larger breweries such as A-B InBev had either basically ignored or simply co-opted these smaller players’ tastes and techniques. The odd acquisition, such as A-B’s 1995 purchase of a major stake in Redhook, or product launches, such as Coors’ Blue Moon, also in 1995, seemed sufficient to keep the competition at bay. 

Then, in the new century, craft beer began to grow at a frenetic pace. The number of craft breweries swelled from around 1,500 in 2000 to well more than 4,800 in 2015. It wasn’t unusual for hundreds of craft breweries and brewpubs to open annually. Production levels spiked, and craft beers enjoyed more shelf space and bar taps than ever before. They permeated popular culture, too. President Barack Obama would famously serve a honey ale, which the White House mess brewed with ingredients he personally bought, at a Super Bowl party in 2011. 

It was time, then, to slap down this growing industry niche. 

It’s unlikely that larger breweries would feel the need today to produce such a withering critique of craft beer. So much has changed in the past 10 years. Big alcohol vendors and private equity firms have taken over legions of craft breweries (2015 would host the first nine- and 10-figure deals for craft breweries in Heineken’s purchase of half of Laguintas and Constellation Brands’ $1 billion deal for Ballast Point). COVID-19’s aftershocks and higher financing costs doomed an unusually high number of breweries last year. 

And, of course, the rise of hard seltzer, the legalization of recreational marijuana across several states, and millennials’ proclivity for sobriety have hampered craft beer sales too. Never mind that Boston Beer/Sam Adams has the wherewithal to do its owner Super Bowl commercials now — including one in 2021 that mocked Anheuser-Busch InBev. 

From the archives

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The post Did the Super Bowl’s Pumpkin Peach Ale Ad Age Well? first appeared on All About Beer.

By the end of the decade, every producer would comply. And why not? The initial law carried a daily fine of $10,000 for noncompliance, a penalty that’s only grown through cost of living adjustments to $25,561 a day.

The law marked the first time ever that the federal government had required alcohol to carry a health warning. Federal authorities might expand it now, following research and remarks from now-former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. In early January, Murthy highlighted what he believed to be the “direct link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk.”

Based on the fallout from the 1988 law, an expanded alcohol warning label probably isn’t that much to worry about. 

At the time, you wouldn’t have thought that. The law followed years of panic and acrimony over the need for one — as well as over the scope, the wording, its placement, even its font size. “It’s almost impossible to read,” complained U.S. Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee in November 1989 as the window for compliance closed. “The [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] has purposely allowed the industry to come up with a label that is illegible.”

The law, too, arrived in an era much like our own of shifting drinking habits and fresh concerns over what people were putting into their bodies. 

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program (D.A.R.E.) both had sprung up in the early 1980s to warn of the dangers of alcohol. Reagan and first lady Nancy would address the nation in primetime from the White House residence in September 1986 about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, particularly to young people. Perhaps most significantly, the U.S. government under Reagan used the non-disbursement of federal highway funds to cajole states into raising their drinking ages one after the other to 21.

Moreover, though brewers and consumers couldn’t have known at the time, post-Prohibition beer sales had peaked for the 20th century in the early 1980s. They wouldn’t tumble precipitously but they wouldn’t ascend sudden heights either. 

Shadowing everything, too, was a boom in health and fitness. Hundreds of exercise videos debuted just in time for the rise of the in-home VCR; and gym chains Bally Total Fitness, Planet Fitness, Crunch and Equinox would launch in the 1980s and early 1990s. It’s safe to assume that more Americans than ever before were hitting the gym; and buff lunkheads like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarznegger and Tom Cruise were top box office draws.

In the end, individual breweries as well as trade groups publicly supported the law — the Beer Institute pronounced it reasonable (as well as readable). 

In fact, many in the industry quietly welcomed the warning label. That’s because consumers were routinely suing breweries for health damages, including birth defects and even early death. For instance, the widow of a 26-year-old Pennsylvania man who died from pancreatitis sued Stroh because she said her husband’s near-daily habit of a few Old Milwaukees caused the disease. A trial court rejected the claim, but an appeals court reversed that decision in 1987. The case appears to have been settled or withdrawn. 

Such lawsuits were horrible publicity and harmed the share prices of larger breweries. The 1988 warning label, then, helped indemnify breweries in much the same way that tobacco companies typically escaped liability for their products following warning labels beginning in the 1960s.  

Despite this climate hostile to alcohol — and including the unprecedented health warning — a curious thing happened after 1988. Beer and the brewing industry exploded in all sorts of directions. The most obvious was the rise of craft beer, which included a steep jump in the number of breweries as well as brewpubs and taprooms. Styles once thought to be in terminal decline (think IPA and porter) were resurrected, and macro producers enjoyed some of their strongest product rollouts in years (think Coors’ Blue Moon or Miller’s Plank Road line, including Red Dog). 

Yes, there would be shakeouts and dips, and downright crises — especially the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, by and large, brewing took the warning label, and the changes around it, and kept on ticking (or tippling). 

The lesson is not apples-to-apples transferable to today. The brewing industry now faces a generational change in attitudes toward drinking that wasn’t present in the 1980s. Plus, no one had conceived of hard seltzer (I think). But there were definitely challenges at the time that spelled trouble — and a government health warning was the last thing the industry needed.

Yet, cometh the boom after that label. 

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The post A Cancer Warning on Beer Packaging? Nobody Panic. first appeared on All About Beer.

Out of nostalgia and obligation I added it to the cart.

Not too long ago the idea of summer specific offerings from larger breweries was met with excitement and reverence. Sam Adams Summer Ale comes to mind as one that led a generation of beer drinkers to wish for the warm weather as soon as it arrived every Spring. Bright and lemony, it never crossed into the soda like sweetness offered by shandies. Sam Summer, first introduced in the mid 1990s – was exciting because it was a limited run, it conjured up ideas of hot afternoons on the lake, camping, or just hanging around a backyard cookout.

At some point years ago the Boston Beer, the company behind the brand, changed the recipe by using what they said were different lemons. That taste was more artificial, and a bit of soul was lost. It never regained that snap and vibrancy it once had, at least for me. The brewery would again change the recipe in 2019.

Now, before you roll your eyes, this is not another column where a guy who has been writing about beer for a long time laments that the landscape has changed and wants things to go backwards. It’s perfectly reasonable that palates change as do life experiences. Sam Summer lives happily in my mind in a good way for my mid-to-late 20s. There are drinkers today who still get those experiences in their own way today, and I’m happy for them.

Summer Refreshment

I was at the local beer store to buy a 30 pack of Genesee cream ale when I saw the Oberon. Genny Cream is a beer I’ve had a fascination and fondness for as long as I can remember. Simple green and white cans, easy drinking, thirst quenching. There are no frills, no grand tasting notes, nothing to say except it’s a beer that does the job it’s supposed to do.

Being the editor of a beer publication is a charmed life. There are a lot of samples that come into the office that I gladly drink and catalogue and take tasting notes on. There are occasionally leftovers, and on a holiday weekend like July 4, I will load up one cooler of those hoppy and experimental ales and lagers to bring them to parties where my beer loving friends will be present. They can dig around and find something that strikes their stout or hazy fancy.

A second cooler is filled with Genny and that’s what I go back to again and again. It’s simple, consistent, pairs with everything coming off the grill, and keeps me hydrated. It’s a tradition I’ve created for myself that fits a long weekend where I try to unplug from work.

Fading Rays

Which brings be back to Oberon.

Bell’s Brewery, now owned by Kirin, has put significant marketing behind Oberon. There’s a big party at the brewery to celebrate its annual launch. Some line extensions have been introduced.

For craft beer drinkers of a certain age, and for new ones coming of age, the familiar sun logo – a cross between a bumper on CBS Sunday Morning and the angry sun in Super Mario Bros. 3 – is a visual Pavlovian cue that warm weather is upon us.

I opened the first can of the 12-pack about an hour before I was compelled to sit down at the table to write this. I had two more in quick succession to confirm my suspicions. This is a perfectly OK beer. The orange peel comes through, the medium body keeps the taste buds engaged and the tongue a bit fat. A 5.8% abv gets the good time going a bit faster than other summer seasonals. This year, for me, it was just tasting a bit different, a little diminished.

I recall fondly summers, in my late 30s, on the lake whiling away the hours, going through cases of this with friends. We all (mostly) have kids now, so the abv does more harm than good come the next day.

At this point in my life Oberon is a good nostalgia beer. It brings back more memories than it does help make new ones. I suspect there are drinkers out there that feel the same way, as well as younger ones who feel the opposite.

Forever summer

Summer is a great time to drink beer. Hard Seltzers have taken a lot of the wind out of the summer seasonal beers, but beer lands a bit better than the seltzers and other flavored malt beverages, there’s something that and a little more soul to it. Something that feels a little more real, substantial.

There was a time in craft beer where watermelon wedges were served with watermelon ales, or blueberries added to pints of blueberry summer ales. They added visual pop and flavor to these beers and reminded us of where we were on the calendar.

Seasons are fleeting. The older we get the faster they seem to go. Having a drink of nostalgia brings happier times to the forefront of the mind. Breweries of all sizes now make their own summer seasonal, and this column, if nothing else, is an encouragement to get out there to make some warm weather memories with new-to-you beers.

And for those drinkers who don’t want to let go of summer no matter what the calendar says, MolsonCoors announced that its Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy is now available year-round.

For me? I’m happy. Oktoberfest lagers have been on shelves since early August and Labor Day weekend means it’s almost time for the winter warmers to arrive, and with it fresh nostalgia.

Since 1979 All About Beer has offered engaging and in-depth articles and interviews covering every aspect of brewing and beer culture. Our journalism needs your support. Please visit our Patreon Page to show your appreciation for independent beer writing. 

The post Summer Beer Blues: Have They Lost Their Cool? first appeared on All About Beer.

The tradition started on a holiday before I was fully writing about beer, had a few extra dollars in my pocket, and wanted to expand my beer horizons past hops or lagers. The label, a portrait of the Mary, the Duchess of Burgundy, is a familiar site around the world, and is the flagship offering from Brouwerij Verhaeghe in West Flanders, Belgium. 

Flanders Red is not too common a style and can be difficult to make well. The base of rich roast malts and aged hops along with ambient yeast helps give the beer its distinctive taste. The final product is a blend of 18-month old and 8-month old double, and spontaneously fermented ales that is aged in oak casks. There is also a cherry adjunct version of the beer available, as well as a low ABV “petit” offering in some markets, but I suggest sticking with the original.

I was so taken by this beer those many years ago and come back to it annually, if not sooner. It is among my favorite beers. In fact, I included it in my roundup for the CAMRA book World’s Greatest Beers.

Poured into a chalice, this complex tart ale has aromas and flavors of black cherry, toffee and balsamic vinegar. It is medium bodied and smooth, with a neat little dry finish that tickles the salvatory glands. It is artful and filled with so many layers that working through a four pack will reveal new flavors or suggestions with each one. 

Suitable whenever the mood strikes, this appeals to my inner Christmas nature. It can be paired with fruit cake and roasts, or just spending a little time with this beer in the quiet of the evening helps put the holiday into perspective, almost demanding that I slow down a bit and get lost in the twinkle of the lights on the tree. I always welcome the experience.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

 This beer reminds me of my favorite Christmas song, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

“Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Let your heart be light

From now on your troubles will be out of sight

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Make the Yuletide gay

From now on your troubles will be miles away

Here we are as in olden days

Happy golden days of yore

Faithful friends who are dear to us

Gather near to us once more

Through the years we all will be together

If the fates allow. Hang a shining star upon the highest bow.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas now.”

Song written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane.

Wishing you all something great in your glass, wonderful company to share it with, the peace of the season, and a very happy and prosperous new year.

The post Duchesse de Bourgogne: A Beer for Christmas Eve first appeared on All About Beer.

A true Renaissance man, his interests ranged from Science Fiction to philanthropy, and beer.

When writing for All About Beer, Wooster mainly focused on book reviews. History was a passion and he had been attending the Ales Through the Ages symposium in Williamsburg, Virginia when he was struck near his hotel.

The Williamsburg Police Department did not respond to a request for information. It is unclear if the department has made any arrests or the current state of the investigation.

It is in the mail

In several other obituaries and tributes posted online a common thread emerged. Wooster a veracious reader would take to sending articles – both digital and printed – to authors and writers he befriended over the years in multiple fields.

I was proud to be included in those mailings. Over the last several years he reached out when he noticed that an article of mine was used to illustrate a page in the recently released The Dogfish Head Book: 26 Years of Off-Centered Adventures and that The Week had been re-running reviews and insights I had first published in Wine Enthusiast. In both cases he spotted these before I did.

In an exchange I’ve long remembered Wooster reached out on Christmas Eve 2014 sharing thoughts on a piece I wrote for the Washington Post about Russian dressing, and its differences from the more popular Thousand Island dressing.

In the note he shared this tidbit:

“You should know my single favorite food item is the Montgomery Burger at Woodside Deli in Silver Spring [Maryland], which is a burger with fried onions and Thousand Island dressing on rye bread.”

That deli, according to online reports, closed in 2022.

He reached out just after New Year in 2015 to note the same piece had run in the Philadelphia Inquirer that weekend.

Constantly reading

In his tribute in the National Review John J. Miller wote that Wooster would send him clippings and links from other people named John Miller.

“Early on, he sent clips by regular mail, cut from the pages of his prodigious reading,” Miller wrote. “At some point, the emails outnumbered the stamped envelopes. Along the way, I learned about hordes of people with whom I share a name. They included loads of criminals and at least one person who attended a Star Trek convention as a Klingon.”

Wooster was thoughtful and he was inquisitive.

Stan Hieronymus, who presented at Ales Through the Ages spent time with Wooster during the weekend but had left Virginia before the incident.

“As was typical of Martin, he had plenty of questions about hops when we headed to lunch after the Saturday am session,” says Hieronymus. “Typical because he asked the questions in a way I painlessly realized changes I could have made in my presentation that would have made what I was saying clearer.”

In addition to his work for All About Beer and other beer publications Wooster was the author of three books Angry Classrooms, Vacant Minds (Pacific Research Institute, 1994), The Great Philanthropists and the Problem of ‘Donor Intent’ (Capital Research Center, 1994; revised 1998, 2007, and 2017), and Great Philanthropic Mistakes (Hudson Institute, 2006; revised 2010).

Additionally, his articles and reviews appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Washington Times, American Spectator, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Commentary, Elle, Air and Space, Esquire, Philanthropy, Policy Review, Reader’s Digest, Reason, and the Washingtonian.

“I aspired to his standards when writing the occasional book review,” says Lew Bryson.

An Interest in Beer

Any writer will tell you that praise and compliments are almost as good as being fairly paid for work.

In late 2015, during my first stint as editor of this publication, Wooster reached out via email:

“I think ALL ABOUT BEER is showing steady improvement.  There’s a lot more depth to the articles than in the past and a lot less filler.  And I’m not just saying this because you publish me.

THANK YOU for letting me know about STRANGE TALES OF ALE.  I love Martyn Cornell’s work and did NOT know about this book.

I am in the happy condition of having TOO MANY BOOKS to review.  I like being in this condition!”

Praise like that from Wooster was a gift.

A resident of Maryland he was active in the beer community in the greater Washington, D.C. area.

“I first met him at a Brickskeller tasting in the early 90s and last saw him a few years back at the Silver Spring farmers market,” says Volker Stewart founding partner at The Brewer’s Art in Baltimore. “Our conversations were always fairly brief but covered a wide variety of topics in that brief time. I will miss him.”

Indeed. He will be missed by all who knew him, including, I bet, his local post office.

Articles by Martin Wooster

A sampling of book reviews by Martin Wooster from the All About Beer archives:

Brewing Champions: A History of the International Brewing Awards.

The Homebrewers Guide to Vintage Beer

Gilroy was Good for Guinness

The post “Wooster here…” Remembering a Man of Many Letters first appeared on All About Beer.

In the fall of 1997, a new brewery opened amid 136 acres of an old hop farm in Cooperstown, New York. Brewery Ommegang was named after the medieval pageants held in what is now Belgium.

The animating force behind the new brewery was a husband-and-wife team, Donald Feinberg and Wendy Littlefield, who had long run the import company Vanberg & DeWulf, which specialized in bringing Belgian brands such as Affligem, Duvel, Frank Boon and (especially) Saison Dupont to the U.S.

The launch of Ommegang in 1997—it’s first day of brewing was October 17, following six months of construction—seemed a natural progression for the duo.

It wasn’t just the couple’s own interest in Belgian beer, which dated back to 1979, when the recently minted Yale graduates eloped and moved to Belgium. Nor was it their partners on the venture, which included the three Moortgat brothers that then owned Duvel maker Duvel Moortgat (as well as their uncle), Affligem’s managing director, and a pair of cousins that owned Belgium’s Dubuisson Brewery.

It was that Belgian beer was having a moment in America in the mid-1990s.  

The moment started, actually, on August 23, 1990. That was the Thursday when the Discovery Channel, which beamed into roughly 37 million American households then, broadcast “The Burgundies of Belgium” episode in the critic Michael Jackson’s Beer Hunter series. The primetime episode likely gave Belgian beer its widest consumer audience ever in the United States.

The following year, Jackson’s Great Beers of Belgium debuted. Donald Feinberg and Wendy Littlefield’s Vanberg & DeWulf would publish it in the States in 1995, in fact, and, like with Jackson’s World Guide to Beer 14 years before, Great Beers made it into some influential and impressionable hands.

Also in 1991, a then-married couple, Kim Jordan and Jeff Lebesch, started what they called the New Belgium Brewing Co. out of their basement in Fort Collins, Colorado. It was just what its name implied: a brewery producing beers in the Belgian tradition, rather than the German, Czech and English ones that dominated the U.S. marketplace.

So novel was New Belgium’s approach that it literally defied categorization at the Great American Beer Festival in 1992, failing to fall into any of the designated styles for judging. In 1993, the GABF would add a “Mixed, Specialty” category—and New Belgium’s Abbey Ale, inspired by Belgian dubbel, won gold.

Ommegang’s 1997 launch could be seen as a tipping point, then, for Belgian beer in the U.S.: Two breweries now, both on their way to becoming two of the larger microbreweries in the country, and the evangelization efforts of Michael Jackson. (It didn’t hurt, either, that a clutch of Belgian restaurants had recently opened in America’s financial, cultural and media capital— “Suddenly, tiny nation is a New York trendsetter,” went the headline on a New York Times article in March 1999.)

There was also one other factor driving Belgian beer’s mid-1990s moment, and that was the import work of companies such as Vanberg & DeWulf  (the portfolio of which Total Beverage Solution acquired in 2014) and Merchant du Vin, which Charles Finkel started in Seattle way back in 1978.

The Belgian brands these companies marketed stood out at a time when the likes of lambics and saisons were the playthings of well-traveled aficionados—or at least the sorts who knew of Michael Jackson the critic as well as Michael Jackson the pop star.

And, as for Ommegang now, Duvel Moortgat is the sole owner. Also, as for why Cooperstown, Wendy Littlefield bought her husband a Yankee fantasy camp experience at the site of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The couple fell in love with the town, and made it the home of their brewery 20 years ago.

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, now in its second edition, and Whiskey Business: How Small-Batch Distillers Are Transforming American Spirits.

The post When Belgium Came to Cooperstown first appeared on All About Beer.

She and her husband, Dan Carey, first talked about launching a brewery in January 1993. They drew a 30-mile circumference around Madison, Wisconsin, shortly thereafter, and Dan used soon-to-expire frequent-flier miles in February to scope potential sites.

By June, the couple, then both 33, and their two elementary-school-age daughters had relocated in U-Hauls to the town of New Glarus from Fort Collins, Colorado, where Dan had worked as a brewing supervisor at mighty Anheuser-Busch.

Why New Glarus? And why 1993?

Deb Carey was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls, both in Wisconsin. Plus, during that February trip in the dead of a typically unforgiving Upper Midwest winter, Dan had stopped for gas in New Glarus on his way to see a friend in the brewing business in Monroe, Wisconsin.

New Glarus reminded the San Francisco native of a town he and Deb had lived in near Munich during a brewing apprenticeship at Ayinger. Besides, he noticed a warehouse for sale. Dan forgot to the get the number on the side of the building; and Deb, in those pre-Google days, had to get on the phone to local businesses to track down the warehouse’s owner.

That owner was willing to trade a year of occupancy for stock in the future brewing company.

So the space was settled.

Equipment came via secondhand dairy gear and a Small Business Administration auction of a failed brewpub in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Technical expertise came via Dan, who had studied brewing at the University of California-Davis and the Siebel Institute. Business expertise came via Deb, who had been launching her own entrepreneurial concerns going back to her late teens, including a furniture-importing business when the couple lived in Oregon.

The initial seed money for New Glarus—which the two incorporated with the state of Wisconsin in April 1993, barely two months after the town of New Glarus charmed a gassing-up Dan Carey—came from investors such as the warehouse owner and from the Careys’ selling their Fort Collins house.

Once ensconced in the Badger State, it was time to go for broke.

“If it didn’t work, we would have to go live in our cars,” Deb Carey told me recently. “There was no family money. There was, like, no basement that was attractive that we could move into.”

New Glarus’ first release, a pilsner called Edel Pils (which it will re-release as part of its 25th-anniversary celebration next year), debuted in September 1993; and the brewery moved about 300 barrels in its first year. The number crept upward from there.

But within that production rise lay a curious feature of New Glarus even more improbable than the Careys’ fast startup window: The brewery has largely only distributed in Wisconsin, a state that had just over 5 million residents in 1993 and that still ranks toward the American middle population-wise—California or Texas, it ain’t.

Still, the approach has worked: New Glarus is today one of the nation’s 20 largest craft operations—and 25 breweries overall—in terms of beer sales volume, per the Brewers Association’s latest figures.

For a while in the mid-1990s, just after its launch, New Glarus did distribute in the Chicago area about 140 miles to the southeast and one state over. But Deb Carey, who did the brewery’s sales calls its first few years, tired of the commute in and out of America’s third-largest city and realized New Glarus could still grow without the Illinois accounts.

The couple, after all, had relocated to Wisconsin from Colorado in part because Dan Carey had wearied of working rotating shifts for Anheuser-Busch as a brewing supervisor. They wanted off the treadmill, so to speak, even if it meant that it took the Careys about 10 years at New Glarus to match Dan’s salary at the world’s biggest brewery.

“It’s not about the size,” Deb Carey said. “We’re trying to be profitable and take care of the people around us—that is really the goal.”

As for once again going beyond Wisconsin’s cheesy borders? Not in the cards for New Glarus’ second quarter-century. “I constantly wonder why people are in so many states,” Deb Carey said, “in so many countries. There is a long list of people in 15, 20 countries. I don’t get it.”

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, now in its second edition, and the new Whiskey Business: How Small-Batch Distillers Are Transforming American Spirits.

The post New Glarus: The Fastest Startup in the Midwest first appeared on All About Beer.

In 1993, Lagunitas was just starting up, and breweries as varied as Stone, Victory, Dogfish Head, and Smuttynose did not exist as commercial concerns.

In 1993, there was no Brewers Association, never mind a definition from that group defining a craft brewer or a craft beer.

In 1993, brewpubs and India pale ales were still curiosities, and homebrewing was still illegal in many states.

In 1993, there was no Blue Moon from Coors, and Miller’s Icehouse was considered novel.

In 1993, the World Wide Web was a year old. The guys who started Untappd were in the early grades of elementary school.

Yes, 1993 was eons divorced from today’s American brewing scene—and not randomly so. It was the last quiet year, before everything changed rapidly, dramatically, and what looks like unalterably.

At the time, the trend was toward ever-greater consolidation and homogenization in the brewing industry—despite the rise of what were then called microbreweries, which numbered fewer than 200, and brewpubs, which numbered fewer than 330.

Anheuser-Busch seemed destined for a final, Game of Thrones-like showdown with Miller for full control of the nation’s domestic beer production.

If consumers—or distributors—entertained microbrewing at all, it was invariably a Samuel Adams or a Pete’s Wicked.

Then, in 1994, everything started to change.

That year alone saw the development of Coors’ Blue Moon, big beer’s strongest answer to date to the rise of micro-breweries; and the start of those same large breweries buying sizable stakes and then complete control of micro-breweries, including Anheuser-Busch’s purchase of 25 percent of Redhook.

Numerous breweries across the country, including Lagunitas, Victory and Smuttynose, either started production or rolled out their first products.

The mid-1990s would see even more activity and more breweries—the number of brewpubs jumped above 1,000 in 1998 and the number of production breweries reached well above 400. Macro-breweries at the same time would continue to multiply their answers to this rising trend, and consumers and critics trickled, then poured onto the web to share their opinions on beer and breweries.

Microbreweries raised money through stock offerings, and brewpub chains proliferated. And the IPA? Newcomers such as Dogfish Head (1995) and Stone (1996) saw to its popularity.

Of course, change is rarely easy. And with these post-1993 changes came controversies and convulsions that seem very familiar today.

There were boos at the 1996 Craft Brewers Conference, when David Geary, then of D.L. Geary’s of Maine, defended Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Co. for contract brewing. There were accusations around the same time—from Koch in particular—of some breweries selling out for partnering with the likes of Anheuser-Busch.  

And throughout the late 1990s, there was speculation about a bubble—too many entrants and too little demand, whatever the growth.

A shakeout did come at the turn of the century; and what came up through 1993 and just beyond came crashing down. The year 1999 would be the first in which more microbreweries closed than opened, according to The New York Times.

Of course, smaller-batch, more traditional brewing in the U.S. has risen steadily and noisily from that nadir—and American brewing in general has changed dramatically (witness the recent $106 billion Anheuser-Busch InBev-SABMiller deal). There are more players than ever before, more consumers, more media attention, more volume, more festivals, more sales, more everything!

A far cry from that last quiet year.  

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, now in its second edition, and the new Whiskey Business: How Small-Batch Distillers Are Transforming American Spirits.

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Twenty-five years ago, the then-Miller Brewing Co. was preparing to roll out a beer it called Icehouse, which it clearly considered an answer to twin realities in American beer in the very early 1990s.

One was that beer consumption and sales were basically flat, particularly for the wares that Miller and its biggest rivals Coors and Anheuser-Busch produced (though the trio did account for about three-quarters of the American beer market then).

Part of this flatness was due to an excise tax increase—breweries passed the tax on to consumers in the form of higher prices and consumers pulled back from purchases—and part was due to the second reality that Miller hoped to address with its new brand.

That reality was the steady rise of what was then called microbrewing.

To be sure, these smaller, independently owned operations with their more traditional fare accounted for an infinitesimal slice of the U.S. beer market—well under 5 percent—but, much like today, microbrewing was growing while the bigger players’ sales were just piddling along.

What’s more, Miller had its own subset of challenges in this sluggish sales climate. Demand was slowing for two of its biggest hits—Miller Lite, introduced in 1975, and Miller High Life, introduced in 1903. Miller was still comfortably No. 2 in the nation behind Anheuser-Busch—its five-year-old Miller Genuine Draft was picking up a lot of sales slack—but new was the name of the game.

Miller would introduce other brands during this period, including its Miller Reserve series, complete with what it called a “velvet stout” and Miller Clear, which was exactly what it sounded like—a beer shorn, through filtration, of its color. (“Miller has a history of trying to remove the character from beer,” Michael Jackson dryly noted in the British press around the debut of Miller Clear.)

But Icehouse was different.

For one thing, it was the inaugural offering of something called the Plank Road Brewery. That had been the original name of the Milwaukee brewery that Frederick Miller, Miller’s founder, bought in 1855. While Icehouse was not actually brewed in any physical property called Plank Road, the 19th-century moniker served as the name of a new Miller division.

Plus, it just seemed old-timey, a none-too-subtle nod toward the sort of aura that surrounded fast-growing microbrewing.

Plank Road’s first offering happened to be the first domestically produced ice beer sold in the United States. Miller had been importing Molson Ice from Canada, but the company’s Icehouse was the first brewed stateside.

What was it, exactly? According to Miller, Icehouse—and ice beer in general—was a lager chilled to below freezing to create ice crystals before aging. The move apparently imparted a smoother taste and could goose the alcohol content a bit.

It’s debatable whether ice beer represented a new style or just a new gimmick. Either way, Icehouse proved a going commodity. It would never match the industry-changing sales of Miller Lite or even of the flailing Miller High Life, both of which at different times were the second-best-selling beers in the U.S.

But Miller felt confident enough in late 1993 to ease Icehouse out of select markets such as Michigan, Minnesota and California’s East Bay and into the rest of the nation, too.

As for Miller Reserve Velvet Stout and Miller Clear, the company discontinued those offerings by mid-decade. Sorry. 

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Miller High Life debuted in 1981 instead of 1903. We regret the error.

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, now in its second edition, and the new Whiskey Business: How Small-Batch Distillers Are Transforming American Spirits.

The post How Icehouse Got To Your House first appeared on All About Beer.

The Brewers Association’s recently announced Independent Craft Brewer Seal? No. It’s the Good Beer Seal that six New York City bar owners launched in 2009 to honor and differentiate those bars (like theirs) serving and promoting “craft” beer.

Two things inspired the Good Beer Seal.

One, restaurants in New York City were slapping the Slow Food movement’s Snail of Approval seal on their windows and materials, a way of telling potential customers that the food they might enjoy was prepared carefully and from quality ingredients, often local.

The other was that New York state did not allow breweries to sell their wares by the glass on-site—that would not come until 2014. In 2009, it was only samples at the end of a tour, say.

“We saw ourselves as kind of the tasting rooms,” says Jimmy Carbone, owner of Manhattan’s Jimmy’s No. 43 and one of those half-dozen bar owners behind the seal.

Originally limited to bars in New York’s five boroughs, bars in the city’s immediate region were eventually allowed to earn it as well. Plus, Carbone said that bars in other cities, including Chicago, may be eligible starting next year.

A committee, none of whose members are affiliated with a Good Beer Seal bar, picks inductees. The seal is not consecrating any new members this year, though. Instead, a July 20 event that’s part of July Good Beer Month in New York, will honor the approximately 70 existing seal holders.

Although the Brewers Association says that the Good Beer Seal did not influence its new Independent Craft Brewer Seal, the two share unmistakable similarities.   

The biggest one is a jones for ownership independence. Only bars that are mostly, if not solely, independently owned and operated are eligible for the Good Beer Seal. Only breweries, brewpubs and brewing companies that are mostly, if not solely, independently owned are eligible for the Independent Craft Brewer Seal.

There is also a shared commitment to a certain type of beer. In the BA’s case, it’s that type of beer that fits the trade group’s definition of “craft”—made with certain ingredients (and without certain others), in certain amounts within certain time periods.

For the Good Beer Seal, only bars that show what its founders describe as a “commitment” to carrying and properly serving “the best beers”—mostly domestic microbrewers and specialty imports—can slap the designation on their property.

The actual criteria aside for either seal, both seals were also born of a boom in brewing and a desire to sort it all out for consumers, a desire that fit nicely and not uncoincidentally with self-promotion. In New York, it was the jump in the sheer number of beers available from smaller producers. Nationally, it was the jump in that number of smaller producers.

Whereas in New York City a generation before Good Beer Seal’s 2009 debut there might have been a handful of specialty imports available and the odd West Coast indy on tap—think Anchor or Sierra Nevada—the number had marched steadily upward.

There were dozens of labels available by the late 1990s, many locally produced—participants in the second annual New York City Brewpub Crawl Marathon in 1996 had the pick of up to 72 beers from 12 brewpubs—and hundreds by the late 2000s.

Nationally, the producers behind those labels had famously multiplied, from a few hundred in the late 1990s to the record 5,300 and counting nowadays. Not all of those breweries are independently owned.

That led the BA to further try to sort things out for consumers (after all, not every beer drinker is tuning into the latest debate about the definition of a craft brewer). A desire to cut through the noise seems to ballast the point of both the Independent Craft Brewer Seal and the older Good Beer Seal.

The Good Beer Seal started one year after the first New York Craft Beer Week—now simply New York Beer Week—when it was clear residents were willing to pour into establishments to spend money on all those labels flooding the nation’s largest city.

Here was a way to steer those patrons to the bars that served these “best beers” properly and with a side of explanation from servers and bartenders. The seal’s originators also in 2009 launched July Good Beer Month to highlight not only local breweries and brewpubs, but attendant businesses such as beer-focused bars.

As for the Independent Craft Brewer Seal, it launched after the start of a trend in macro-brewers such as Anheuser-Busch buying up formerly independent, smaller-batch breweries—and then continuing on as if nothing much had changed.

The Brewers Association saw it as a way to guide consumers to those smaller producers still independently owned.  It doesn’t hurt that those who use the seal are invariably BA members anyway.

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, now in its second edition, and the new Whiskey Business: How Small-Batch Distillers Are Transforming American Spirits.

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