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.

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.

The post The Last Quiet Year in Beer first appeared on All About Beer.

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.

The post Craft Beer’s First Seal of Independence first appeared on All About Beer.

Though his brewery shares an anniversary with America’s Independence Day, it was during an extended stay in Europe that Mike Hale was inspired to launch what has become the oldest independently-owned, small-batch brewery in the Pacific Northwest.

Hale’s wife was on a Fulbright teacher exchange in 1982 with an educator from England. The couple had upped sticks from Washington State and settled in for a while. Hale himself couldn’t work, so instead he spent time traveling the countryside, checking out smaller, often one-man breweries.

He had some experience with the genre.

Hale launched a business cultivating vines in Sonoma County, California, in the 1970s during that state’s initial fine wine boom. (He had earned a degree in forestry from the University of California-Berkeley in 1965, but soon discovered that the “job of forester seemed to have more to do with cutting forests down” than cultivating them—Hale didn’t like that and he left for wine and vines.)

It was while in Sonoma that he went to barbecue at a friend’s place. The friend’s neighbor was an ex-Navy mechanic with a bit of a reputation as a cantankerous eccentric—in particular, the neighbor did not like people dropping by his business unannounced. Jack McAuliffe’s business was a small brewery called New Albion, the first such new one in the United States since Prohibition.

McAuliffe’s neighbor—and Hale’s buddy—called over the fence during the barbecue: Hale had tried New Albion, would Jack mind if they dropped by? “Come on over,” McAuliffe called back.

Over they went to see McAuliffe’s gravity-powered brewery.

“It was very strange for those days,” Hale recalled during a recent interview. The impromptu visit to New Albion gave Hale an idea—even though it would be years, and a move out of the wine business and into semi-retirement in Washington State—before he realized it.

“The notion of a small brewery, it just seemed such a fun idea,” Hale said. “The thought of making better beer was pretty compelling.”  

Not only that, but it seemed more interesting and challenging than wine. “I mean, wine, how boring can you get? The wine is actually made in the vineyard by the vines, and the winemaker tries not to screw it up. He gets one shot a year at it. Well, brewing beer is very creative, and you can do it every day—if you don’t like the result, you can do it different tomorrow.”

That was just some of the knowledge Hale picked up in England a few years later. He returned to Washington State, to the small town of Colville about 70 miles north of Spokane. He gathered investors and equipment—mostly of the used-dairy variety—and built a 10-barrel system that included open fermenters similar to the way things were done in England.

Washington State incorporated Hale’s Ales Ltd. on March 4, 1983. Four months later, the new company brewed its initial run of Hale’s American Pale Ale, an homage to the English ales its founder had fallen in love with (though with German-born Hallertau hops because that’s what Hale could find back then).

The brewery first brewed the pale ale on Independence Day—July 4, 1983. Hale did not plan it that way—it was just how things worked out (the kegs were delivered eight days later to a local bar).

Hale’s Ales would not start bottling until 1997. By that time, the brewery had moved to roomier digs in Seattle—via stops in Kirkland and Spokane—and it was surrounded by hundreds of new arrivals in what was being called microbrewing. There are now more than 350 micro or craft breweries in Washington State alone and more than 5,000 nationwide.

Mike Hale for his part is nonchalant about beating most to the punch. The more important thing is to be good, new or not. “There’s really no advantage,” he said, “to being the oldest guy on the block.”

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 Hale’s Ales: The Northwest’s Oldest Indy Brewery first appeared on All About Beer.

The couple had flown to Ireland all the way from Oregon, and rented a car in Dublin. From there, things started promisingly enough. They drove out into the republic’s sparsely populated western reaches, staying at delightful hotels and enjoying the food and—to them—the surprisingly solid wine selections.

Then the notoriously fickle Irish weather got in the way.

The couple were near the western coast, around Galway, when heavy rains set in, gumming up their travels and those of fellow tourists. Their next hotel was full of guests unable to move on, so the Oregonians were unable to move on.

Stuck, McCarthy hit the hotel bar. He ran through its Scotch and single-malt whisky selection as the rain fell in sheets against the windows—perhaps, in the end, the ideal environment for sampling such fare.

The single-malt whiskies in particular struck McCarthy for their rich flavor. “This is fabulous stuff,” he thought.

He was familiar with the type of spirit. It was hard not to be in McCarthy’s line of work: In 1985, he had started in Portland one of the few independently owned distilleries in the U.S. making spirits in more traditional ways with more traditional ingredients. McCarthy’s Clear Creek—named for his family’s longtime orchard in Oregon—was particularly noted for its eau de vie, or distilled fruit.

It did not produce whiskey, much less single-malt, which had come roaring into vogue in the U.S. in the early 1980s. The reason was simple: The rises of fine wine, white rum and vodka—respectively, California wines, Bacardi and Absolut vodka in particular—had decimated the market for blended whiskey from Scotland (or, as the Scots call it, “whisky” without the “e”).

What to do with the barley-based whiskey that had been aging since the late 1970s? Sell it in its more concentrated single-malt form rather than blend it (the Scots by and large preferred single-malt themselves—they called the blended stuff “cooking whisky”).

Thus, single-malt whiskey from Scotland became a kind of culinary fetish in the U.S., one that echoed fine wine. “There is a great deal of cachet with single-malts,” a representative of the Scottish whisky trade told the New York Times in 1985, the same year McCarthy launched Clear Creek. “Not only can you drink them, but you can bore people’s heads off with what you know about them.”

One of the things that people invariably knew about single-malts was that they came from Scotland. The whiskeys were the crème de la crème spirits-wise of that Celtic jut. Yet, there was no hard-and-fast rule that single-malts had to come from Scotland.

That left an opening for McCarthy; and he filled it in part with beer.

After he and his wife finally made it back to the West Coast, he reached out to a fellow Portland purveyor of alcohol: Kurt Widmer, one‑half of the fraternal duo behind Widmer Brothers, one of the oldest micro-breweries in the U.S. outside of California. “Let’s make some whiskey,” McCarthy told his friend.

To start, McCarthy imported from Scotland barley that had been kilned over peat, the dense, boggy soil common to the United Kingdom and Ireland, and which distillers there often use to give single-malts that earthy richness that so beguiled McCarthy.

Widmer then used that barley to brew a smoky beer. McCarthy took back over and, using the same pot still he used for his eau‑de‑vie, distilled from Widmer’s brew a whiskey that he then put into three types of barrels: two made from distinct species of Oregon oak trees, with one barrel kiln‑dried and the other air‑dried, and a barrel used to age sherry.

Around Christmas 1997, after barely three years of aging, McCarthy released a limited amount of what he called McCarthy’s Oregon Single Malt, holding back some to see the effects of more time in the wood.

The debut 20 years ago was a watershed in two ways: McCarthy’s Oregon Single Malt was the first American-made single-malt whiskey released in the U.S, and it marked the first commercial collaboration between a pioneer of small-batch spirits and micro-brewing.

The only thing that came close in 1997 was the Anchor Brewing Co.’s collaboration with itself—that is, owner Fritz Maytag had launched the Anchor Distilling Co. out of the brewery’s San Francisco location in 1993. The new distillery’s first offering shortly after was a whiskey made 100 percent from rye. It was an approach that American distilleries centuries ago had favored—rye was one of the main whiskeys George Washington’s Mount Vernon made in the late 1700s, for instance—but it had long gone out of style.

So the first two comings-together of what came to be called craft beer and craft spirits produced anomalies. They also spawned a trend that ripples through tipples decades on. Any number of smaller brewers have collaborated with smaller distillers on various spirits.

Distilleries routinely lend or sell breweries barrels once used to age whiskey, rum, et al, to in turn age beer. In the case of bourbon, distilleries have no need for the used barrels anyway: The law requires bourbon be aged in unused barrels.

And some breweries, including Massachusetts’ Cisco, Delaware’s Dogfish Head and Oregon’s Rogue, have followed the Anchor route, and added distillation to their mixes, often in the form of independent distilleries.

Perhaps the trend is not so surprising, though. After all, the late Michael Jackson—who himself straddled the beer-spirits divide, becoming the most influential consumer writer on beer and whiskey—never tired of pointing out that the distillation of one couldn’t happen without the same sort of mash that produced the other.

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 Twenty Years Ago, A Mash Made In Heaven first appeared on All About Beer.

On the morning of April 7, 1997, Kirby Shyer, the owner of the recently shuttered Zip City brewpub at Fifth Avenue and 18th Street in Manhattan, poured 3,100 gallons of Belgian tripel down a sewer drain.

A New York Times reporter was there to witness the carnage.

“Once it was over, it was over,” Shyer told the journalist, explaining that federal regulations required him to destroy the beer he had on hand when his seven-year-old brewpub closed.

The reason for the closure might seem familiar to those following small-batch brewing today: a lot of competition.

Zip City—named for a fictional town that novelist Sinclair Lewis invented to satirize American business—had been the oldest operating brewpub in the nation’s largest city. It was celebrated for its German-style lagers and wheats, and a seasonal doppelbock, and for the aesthetic charm of its 150-seat restaurant portion, which included an oval bar enwrapping copper-clad tanks.

For six years, according to Brooklyn Brewery cofounder Steve Hindy, Zip City “did a booming business.” Then the bottom fell quickly out in 1997, and Shyer had to close.

Competition and Collapse

What happened? As Shyer explained, the competition simply became too fierce.

When Zip City launched in November 1991, there were no brewpubs in New York City. The pioneers of Gotham brewpubs, New Amsterdam and Manhattan Brewing, had shuttered. Shyer himself followed the arc of both brewpubs while working in the family eyeglass-manufacturing and -importing business in Queens.

He eventually traveled west to visit the original Pyramid brewery in Washington state and the Schirf Brewing Co.—a.k.a. Wasatch—in Utah. The bug bit, and he realized he could start a brewery back home (he had grown up in the New York City suburbs and now lives in Connecticut).

For a while there, Shyer’s Zip City had the New York brewpub scene to itself because of New Amsterdam and Manhattan’s closures.

But others soon piled in as what was then called micro-brewing picked up nationwide, never mind locally. Brewpubs in particular multiplied rapidly in the early 1990s. There were at least 360 in operation by 1995 and perhaps as many as just under 500, according to the Brewers Association—nearly double the number of standalone production breweries.

This represented phenomenal growth: There had been exactly three brewpubs nationwide in 1983, one in Washington state and two in California.

In New York City, the number of brewpubs quickly grew from zero to one with the 1991 opening of Zip City to at least six by 1997, the year Zip City closed.

Brewing in general had picked up in the city during that period. A July 1996 event called the New York City Brewpub Crawl Marathon, then in its second year, stopped at 12 brewpubs, including Zip City, and involved the opportunity to quaff 72 different beers.

And micro-brewed brands from beyond the city were washing ashore with regularity, plunking more beer choices in front of New York consumers than at any time in probably living memory.

Shyer’s lament about too much competition did not ring hollow, then. After all, there were not only more options than anyone could remember, there was also a much smaller audience.

Whereas today’s smaller breweries might claim 10 to 15 percent of the national market and much more than that in bigger cities such as New York, two decades ago their slice of the American beer pie was much thinner—and it did not generate nearly as much consumer interest as today’s beer scene, with its social media, review apps, festivals, etc.

Yet, while Zip City’s collapse was very much of its time and place in mid-1990s New York, its decline and fall seems very familiar.

In October 2016, Stone Brewing, which started on the other side of the continent around the same time Zip City was closing, announced it was laying off about 5 percent of its workforce. The San Diego County-based operation blamed the move in part on “the further proliferation of small, hyper-local breweries.”

It was a telling example of a phenomenon that seems to have crept up on Stone’s industry while it was fretting the mergers and acquisitions of macro-breweries such as Anheuser-Busch InBev. There are a lot of breweries out there—more than at any one time in American history—and still a relatively small marketshare.

It was a reality that Kirby Shyer 20 years ago would have understood immediately.

The Death of Microbrewing Greatly Exaggerated

There is a silver lining for today compared with back then. Thanks in part to Shyer inviting the nation’s most prominent newspaper to witness good American-made beer going literally down the drain, the media feasted on predictions that this whole micro-brewing trend would soon follow Zip City’s tripel.

The New York Post quoted a retail consultant who took particular aim at brewpubs: “The bloom is off the rose with brewpubs…Brewpubs are complicated businesses which require a lot of capital, a public that drinks a lot of beer and a lot of traffic, and we don’t have these components here in the U.S.”

And here was The New York Times: “Zip City’s closing, and the fact that Mr. Shyer couldn’t sell his quality craft beer, even at a discount, has some in the beer industry talking about a shakeout or, even worse, a backlash among beer drinkers.”

There was a backlash—many consumers did ditch micro-breweries—and a shakeout saw dozens of operations off throughout the late 1990s.

We know now, though, that the death of the trend was clearly exaggerated.  

Read more Acitelli on History posts.

Tom Acitelli is the author of The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution and the forthcoming Whiskey Business: How Small-Batch Distillers Are Transforming American Spirits. He is at work on a biography of Michael Jackson.

The post A Brewpub’s Collapse 20 Years Ago Sounds Familiar first appeared on All About Beer.