Did I mention the nine theaters? There’s at least one golf course; and eight hotels, most with bread and breakfast, in locations ranging from above Seattle, WA, on down to Roseburg in central Oregon. My favorite McM establishment has to be the legendary White Eagle on Portland’s N. Russell Street (nicknamed “Bucket of Blood” from the fighting there in the old days). Two Polish immigrants originally opened this place in 1905, offering recreation, poker, liquor and beer and a boarding house for young Polish immigrants, featuring an opium den downstairs and a brothel upstairs. Now how can you beat that for genuine historical?

The breweries reference over 200 recipes and maybe more than 500 different brews. Each brewer is expected to make all of the major McMenamin beers. They are also given artistic freedom to invent their own. Artistic? Well, yes! Mike told me, in one conversation, that he considers his brewers to be artists. And why not? This is an organization that has a company historian, Tim Hill, and a number of paint artists, all of whom are also given great creative license.

The most distinctive and interesting beer they make is the annual anniversary brew to commemorate the 1983 beginning of their first (combined brothers) venture, the Old Barley Mill Pub, here on Portland’s East side Hawthorne Street. Each year’s brew created for the July 26th anniversary is unique and distinctive.

These anniversary brews are certainly fascinating, not so much for their taste, which is great, as for their method of design. They are designed by what can only be called a Drink Tank. Drink Tank? Well, what else could we call an assemblage of people (usually 30 to 40 folks), each of whom brings a strange and exotic (or even weird) ingredient or feature to add to the current anniversary brew? Magical brews indeed!

Lunch is served and the meeting convened at a secret location—usually, as this year, at their first brewpub, South Portland’s Hillsdale Brewery and Public House. The genial Mike McMenamin chairs the activities.

The wort for the base beer will have been started and will be at a full rolling boil by now. Each Drink Tank participant brings a favorite libation or herb to add, or poem or article to read, and there is usually a musician there to contribute a musical selection from time to time. The various libations, usually including many McM beers, wines and spirits, will be sampled by all at the table. Then the remaining liquor is poured into the offerings vat, which contents will be added to the finished brew as “dry” hopping (added at the beginning of the ferment, but kept separate, after adding their essence, to be discarded early in the fermentation process).

Making Magic

I remember the 1989 brew best: Wisdom Ale, with Fig Newton cookies, rosemary, thyme, sage, peaches and sunflower seeds. There was also ceremony: irises were laid on the cover to the brewery’s open primary fermentor. There are always reading from wise books of the ages. The herb selections were from Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs. That beer had a magical effect, because after the first sip I felt wiser, though my newfound wisdom was gone by day’s end.

There was the very old Longevity Ale (1990) and that was even better—now I could live longer. That effect has lasted to this day: I’m still alive.

In 1991, there was Invisibility Ale. I have a hard time remembering that one, because I may have turned invisible. The herbs were designed to make one scarce to the eye, a non-problem to one’s neighbors, and totally invisible (amaranth, chicory, edelweiss, mistletoe, poppies and some other secret stuff). Did I mention Grateful Dead music (“Stella Blue” by Jerry Garcia)? It may have been a week before I became visible again.

The 1992 Hallucinator Ale was downright scary, as was the ingredient list. The first sip set me to giggling. Suddenly I felt older, wiser, slightly invisible—and giggly.

All at once, I knew the secrets of the universe, but I forgot them immediately and decided to bark at the moon. It was high noon and I was completely discombobulated. Some of the herbs: althea (protection, psychic powers), angelica (protection, healing, visions), lavender (love, longevity, happiness, peace), mint (love, money, psychic powers). Well, you get the picture. That was a rich (but filtered) marinade to add to a beer.

When Pat McNurney, Edgefield grounds manager (who had collected the herbs), actually sipped from the marinade, Mike McMenamin tried to protect him. But his cry, “Pat, stop. Don’t drink that. You’re too important to lose,” was too late. McNurney recovered in a few weeks time, but I still feel giddy.

For the first eight years, there had always been a bottle from a case of Lanson “champagne for connoisseurs only,” acquired from an old brewmaster of the now long-gone Blitz-Weinhard brewery, in France, in 1945, just after WWII had ended. The ‘45 was a banner year for that champagne and we may have consumed the last of that great vintage on the planet in 1996.

My notes from the 2012 meeting are unreadable, but I think that confab featured something like 73 additions, including samples of more than 30 McM and other brews, and many, many wine samples and distilled beverages. One had to be very, very careful that day.

But that wasn’t all that went into that beer. Tiny printed copies of an ad were added to the tub: “Beer is Not Alcohol.” I like that one. There were various other additions including songs, poems and who knows what all.

My contribution? I led the congregation in the Prohibition-era Starvation Army song:

We’re coming, we’re coming, our brave little band

On the right side of Temperance we now take our stand.

We don’t use tobacco because we do think

That the people who use it are likely to drink!

(chorus)

Away, away with rum by gum…the song of the Salvation Army!

We never eat fruitcake, because we do think

That the people who use it are likely to drink.

Oh, can you imagine a sorrier sight

Than a man eating fruitcake until he gets tight!

(chorus)

Away, away with rum by gum…the song of the Salvation Army!

We never eat cookies, they’re made with yeast

And one little bite turns a man to a beast.

Oh, can you imagine a sadder disgrace

Than a man in the gutter with crumbs on his face?

In conclusion, let me state that “Sanity is for sissies; a he-man needs another beer!”

The post Magic Beer—The Annual McMenamin Drink Tank first appeared on All About Beer.

I can’t recall whether it was from Goose Island, Flossmoor Station or Mickey Finn’s, but I remember vividly how that first sip transported me to the Christmas of my youth where my aunts and uncles would all sit around nursing bourbon and 7UP on ice as children ripped open boxes of toys from Santa.

My parents hosted the party each year, and while they were never huge booze hounds, each holiday season offered them the opportunity to procure a new handle (1.75 liters) of Jim Beam for celebrating. On the morning of the celebration, my father poured the first cup and a half into his legendary eggnog while the rest was reserved for drinks. Ours wasn’t a large family, so a handle of Beam lasted until next Thanksgiving, and opening the Christmas bottle was a special moment.

Apart from the sheer size of the bottle, what I remember most is the smell and taste of those drinks. Bourbon is a powerful spirit. Even as a child, I was able to nose sweet caramel, bakers vanilla and the woody notes that erupted from the bottle. For me, the bourbon was always more aromatic then the Christmas candles flickering above the fireplace. But truth be told, I really never liked the way bourbon smelled or tasted.

But Chicago changed the way I felt about bourbon. It was the first time that bourbon stopped being associated solely with the family gatherings. That Saturday morning in 1998, I was staring at a flight of beers aged in bourbon and whiskey casks. As the memories of Christmas past flooded my senses, suddenly the caramel seemed perfect, the vanilla more Tahitian and the spirited wood flavors as warming as the fireplace we used to snuggle up to.

Each new glass of beer was a roller coaster of expression. Squinting across the table, I could almost see a veil of ethanol leaping from the glasses as the beers tried to breathe. These beers were that hot. I wasn’t sure it was even safe to drink some of these beers and, while not a smoker, I was praying no one else would feel the need to light up next to me.

As a judge, the experience was a bit unnerving. There was no rhyme or reason to what was going on in the glasses. It was a bit all too Wild Wild West. It was 1998, and the notion that nobody really understood barrel aging was readily apparent.

Looking around the table, I think most of the judges agreed many brewers were brandishing bourbon barrels like a bandolier-toting Pancho Villa shooting it up south of the border. There were a few notable marksmen whose aim was spot-on. Others used barrels more timidly, like Ralphie staring down the barrel of his new Official Red Ryder Air Gun on Christmas Day. Since then, I’ve come to know that barrel aging has winners and losers, and inevitably some of the flavor gain can be incredible while other examples can make you want to shoot your eye out.

I don’t recall there being more than a dozen or so beers to be judged that day. In truth, many of them were not memorable. Their collective strength, however, is what struck a chord with me. Too many of the beers lacked integrated structure and behaved more like a round of fiery boilermakers at an Irish bar.

Even with more losers then winners, this was a seminal moment. I left the judging session wondering how I’d be able to incorporate the barrel-aging process into the beers I wanted to make. Spirit barrels afforded the key to a new world. I slept that night as if Peter Pan had visited my beer-filled dreams in Chicago hotel room and dared me to imagine.

Being a young and inquisitive brewer, I set out to do what every lad does: I went drinking. Specifically, I went out and sampled a ton of new drams and eventually came to love both bourbon and scotch. Many of these experiences help frame my tasting sessions here at the Lost Abbey Brewing Co. Sampling every barrel before we make decisions on a final blend is tough work, but somebody has to do it.

Where once there were no oak barrels for flavoring beer, today they are everywhere. From the tiniest brewpub to the largest breweries, you can’t tour a facility without kicking a barrel somewhere.

A few years ago, I turned down the opportunity to wire a book on the barrel-aging process as it relates to beer. I was knee-deep in growing a fledging brewery, and it just didn’t make sense. But much of the research I have done over the years makes me a great candidate to be your field guide into this exploding segment of craft brewing.

Hopefully, my insight as the steward for one of the larger collections of barrel-aging beers in this country will be our compass. With 850 oak barrels on hand in our brewery at any given time, I am always learning about liquid evolution and the role barrel aging can play.

So, I’ve been tasked with sharing my experiences with the readers of All About Beer Magazine. The hope is that I will deliver my world of brewing into your living room, kitchen or local tavern. Together, we’ll cover a range of products and producers, and see what’s working for their operations.

My goal for each issue will be to discuss what takes place during the barrel-aging process. While much of it is still a mystery to me, even after 14 years, I remain steadfast in my endeavor to be your fearless leader. Fear not! This is after all beer we’re talking about. It promises to be fun, and you’re going to learn more than you ever cared to know about what can make great beer extraordinary.

Since that first day in Chicago, I’ve come to learn that many of the best alcohols need to kiss oak to be transformed into something glorious. Tequila, scotch, bourbon, Bordeaux and even rum slumber for years in small barrels until they emerge like a bear from hibernation and roar to life. Everywhere we turn, oak is the mysterious kissing bandit making out regularly with some of the most prized alcoholic beverages in the world. And thankfully it is now beer’s turn.

Think of this column as a serial novel unfolding with each issue. Like a novel, there will be a cast of characters. We’ll discuss Proof, The Angel’s Share, a few guys named Cooper, as well as exotic things such as Quercus alba and more. I personally am hoping for a “who would have thunk” ending that will unravel many of the complexities locked inside these barrels.

Next issue we’ll begin with the decisions of oak selection and bending a tree into a barrel. So I leave you today with this first line of our next story …

“I planted a seed today. And though it was but a lonely seed, it will have grown to be a mighty oak when they bury me in that same ground.”

The post Forest From the Trees first appeared on All About Beer.

Later that year, I wandered up to British Columbia and visited the Granville Island Brewing Co. in Vancouver. I knew the brewmaster there at that time and was given a good tour of the premises, along with a sampling of its brews. It had been a good morning. That afternoon, I was tasting various Canadian brews at a local beer emporium when I noticed that the Granville Island beers on tap tasted odd. Since I had savored those same brews at the brewery that morning, I was stunned at how bad they tasted. Then I remembered that particular taste was due to dirty draft lines. In this case it was exceptionally noticeable.

I originally identified this particular taste in Everett, WA, where I grew up. I was drinking with an older friend, a former brewery employee, when he noticed that same phenomenon with a beer we were drinking. He identified this taste parameter to me so I could distinguish it. Later I found out that Everett was notorious in this regard in 1951 and Seattle not much better. I thought nothing more about the matter until that day in Canada when I remembered the very recognizable taste of dirty draft-beer lines.

As it happened, two Granville Island marketing people were seated near me. I stepped over and asked them to try their brewery’s beer and tell me what they thought. They knew something was wrong immediately, but not the reason until I explained it to them. The telltale taste that cruddy draft lines leave in beer is readily recognizable once you have been attuned to it. On my way back down to Portland, I stopped in Seattle and sampled the Oregon brews just to be sure, and there it was, dirty-line syndrome, as I call it. The Seattle brews had the same taste, but I had never tasted them any other way and had thought that was how they were supposed to taste. At that time Portland had a law that the tavern keeper had to clean his lines at least every two weeks, which is why I had never encountered that taste in my home city.

I can’t name the exact culprit in this scenario, but I know it when I taste it, and you would, too, if it were pointed out. I’ve not found anyone in the industry who can dignify that ester with a scientific designation. In any case, the moral here is double: Bar owners should clean their taps regularly and religiously (once a week is not too often), and brewers should sample their brews in as many venues as possible to ensure consistency of taste.

If your favorite beer tastes poor, this could be the reason. If you are new in a pub or if you detect a troubling ester in a familiar beer, check the same beer at another pub, then talk to the manager, but don’t expect much thanks. The last time I identified that taste and told the manager, he was unable to relate to the danger. I’ve not returned to that place. Apparently Portland no longer enforces that line-cleaning ordinance, or it has been repealed as I’ve been told, but all of my favorite haunts seem to be taking good care of their lines.

We have at least one tavern here now that has 100 taps. 100! That’s far more than most pubs can manage. None of the servers could tell me when the beers had gone on draft or when they should be taken off. Of course, none of them could identify problems. In any case, we can conclude that 100 is more than any one establishment can handle.

Our world-famous Horse Brass British-style tavern has about 50 taps. The beer is always great, the staff knowledgeable and the customers happy. The management knows better than to offer beer on 100 taps.

There are other things one should know about the local tavern. Get to know the owner-manager; it never hurts to be friendly and sometimes it can get you free beer, too. A friendly barkeep would appreciate your concern about his operation, no matter what the problem. Just as in the search for a friendly beer retailer, one needs to cherish a good pub keeper, and for similar reasons. Beer is beer, and it doesn’t travel well. The larger the selection, the more opportunity for system failure. A good selection is not necessarily a large selection. Your bartender should be willing and able to tell you how long a particular keg has been on, and  the ABV as well. If it has been on longer than a week, maybe you should make another selection. Ask for a small sample to be sure. As multiple-tap bars become more widespread across the country, the opportunities for problems expand. The more taps there are, the more likely the beer will have been on too long, but more taps also offer you a better opportunity to find a fresh beer to enjoy. Most craft beers are unpasteurized, hence they are fresher tasting but more perishable. Be fussy. Your friendly bar manager should be happy to advise you on his best possibilities and offer samples of his beers. A knowledgeable bar staff is your best defense against bad beer. When you find such a place, cherish the owner, his manager and staff. Reward them with your patronage and friendship. Tip them generously.

Cask Conditioning

More and more establishments are installing British-style cask conditioning facilities, and this can lead to problems for you as well as the bar owner. He or she should train workers to manage such natural fresh-conditioned beers. They should be receptive to constructive criticism from patrons.

The price of beer and the size of the serving are also important. I have found pubs that, I suspect, use the 14-ounce glass as a pint measure. This is inexcusable. If you suspect your local is pulling that on you, go with a friend (don’t do this alone) and bring a measuring glass to determine the real measure. If you find something like that, you should raise hell in a fairly loud manner, so other customers will be aware, too. Of course, not all bar owners will receive such criticism graciously, and the two of you should be prepared to evacuate those premises on short notice. Prosit!

The post The Care and Feeding of Your Favorite Publican first appeared on All About Beer.

This will be my last column, as the Mayans have predicted that we are all to experience a painful death in December 2012. Unless the Mayans are lying, we’re dying. But then again the Mayans weren’t the most trustworthy bunch. Did they really predict the end of the world? No matter, if this is it, I sure as hell ain’t going to be banging out any more articles. I’ll be too busy immersing myself in a sort of Bacchanalian revelry. Caligula will have nothing on me. Bring me my bottle of Infinium and my jewel-encrusted chalice and release the dancing girls. What, no jewel-encrusted chalice or dancing girls? Well, just bring me my 1998 Anheuser-Busch commemorative mug, a can of Steel Reserve and my long-suffering wife.

As the end draws near, it brings on bouts of reflection. Which naturally beget regret and a few points of light. As I look back on my 20-plus-year career in the beer industry, I ask myself what my enduring legacy will be. Mmm. Not much, I fear. I haven’t produced any good beer, erected any fermenters, owned any distribution trucks or sold any beer at retail. I’ve drunk an awful lot of beer and made an awful lot of friends. Urine? And laughs. That counts for something, I guess.

I’d say the main legacy that I’ve left behind is a big honking block of beer writing, chronicling the beer industry’s change five days a week since 1998 in Beer Business Daily. Assuming 250 workdays a year, and an average issue of BBD is 2.5-page long, that’s 8,750 pages of beer trade writing. It’s exhausting just writing that sentence. That’s the equivalent of about 40 novels.

Of course, when I started writing about this industry, it was much different. The players were different, the number of players was different, and the power each player wielded was different. Back then, it was Miller Brewing Co., Coors Brewing Co., Anheuser-Busch and a few regional and craft brewers and importers who didn’t amount to much. In fact, when I got into the beer business in 1991, craft beers had less than one market share point. The largest three brewers (A-B, Miller and Coors) had 80 share points and growing. The regionals (Pabst, G. Heileman, Stroh, Schlitz) were gasping to hold onto their 15 share points, and the imports only had 5 share points and were not growing.

The hot topic that year was the doubling of the federal excise tax on beer, and whether Coors was going to buy Stroh or when Heineken was going to start using more beer distributors instead of wine and spirits distributors. Budweiser was starting to feel softness, but was still by far the largest beer brand in the United States, selling 2.5 times as much as the next-largest brand, Miller Lite. Amazing as it sounds today, Bud Light and Coors Light were selling about the same amount of beer. Corona sold less than a million barrels. Heineken was twice the size of Corona. Pabst Blue Ribbon was in a free fall and would lose half its volume in the next 10 years.

Bud Light now sells more than twice as much as Budweiser, Coors Light outsells Miller Lite, and PBR is back to what it was selling in 1991. And crafts are inching up on seven share points and growing like gangbusters.

The structure of the industry has changed as well. We now have what I’d call a duopoly, with AB InBev and MillerCoors eating up about 80 share points. Both are owned by multinational conglomerates. Craft brewers have sprung up in virtually every town, and some have grown to be national or regional brewers. Yuengling and Boston Beer, which were barely on the radar screen in 1991, are now large players with more than one share point a piece. Stroh, Schlitz and G. Heileman, once players, are gone as breweries. And yet some former big brands are making a comeback. PBR is the big one, but you also have Genny, Lone Star, Rainier, Narragansett and others. Even Budweiser is starting to turn around. My, have times changed and continue to change. But of course, it all won’t matter come December, 2012. If you can’t find any dancing girls, just bring me a turkey leg.

I imagine today’s beer industry is not dissimilar to the beer industry my father encountered in the 1950s and 1960s. While the beer industry of my youth (1980s -1990) were dominated by big national brands which all more-or-less tasted the same, his beer industry was one of strong local and regional breweries with unique characteristics battling against up-and-coming national brands. I remember my father telling me the big national brewers were soon going to dominate everything, and that would be the nail in the coffin for smaller breweries. But of course, if you live long enough, you can see that Madam History, like all beautiful women, occasionally gets bored with herself but is too lazy to think of something new, and so repeats herself. Simba called it the “Circle of Life.”

Industries consolidate in the name of cost efficiencies and the wonders of mass production. And then, when there is nobody left to buy,the consumer wakes up and says, “Hey, I want more choice.” And then the industry de-consolidates. Happened in coffee. Happened in chocolate. And it’s obviously happening in beer with the craft beer renaissance. And it will even happen on the international beer stage. You watch: In the next 10 years, I believe, AB InBev will be broken up and sold off in pieces, because the pieces will be worth more than the whole. Why not 20 years? Because that bitch Madam with her iPhone and Twitter gets bored more easily and quickly these days.

But through it all, there has remained one constant: the beer distributor. Yes, beer distributors have consolidated and become more sophisticated, but they still perform the same function: consolidating orders, selling, delivering and merchandising beer. Since Prohibition repeal, distributors have had to master the art of diplomacy—keeping all of their various beer suppliers happy. Because they have consolidated, they now have to master a very important new task: managing all of the new brands and packages that are coming down the pike at a furious rate. It’s daunting, but with technology, doable. But why bother? It’s all in vain. Are my dancing girls here yet?

Craft brewers have their own challenges today. The main one being raising capital for increasing capacity. If I were a young brewer today, I’d leverage up to the hilt and buy as many tanks and bottling and kegging lines as possible. Because if the world ends, it won’t matter, anyway. If it doesn’t, well, it’s always better to dig a deep hole and climb out of it than to just rest on your laurels. In reality, we very well may end up with too many breweries again at some point, which will facilitate a shakeout and consolidation among craft breweries.

I guess I’m going to keep churning out my paper, chronicling those who actually accomplish things in this great industry. You know, just in case.

The post Apocalypse Brau first appeared on All About Beer.

“Do you find yourself drinking more beer these days, and enjoying it less? An increasing number of Americans are finding themselves in this dilemma. American beer has become lighter and lighter, until finally one is forced to concede that it is indeed water.” I concluded that, for the most part, there was no diversity of choice in American beers, even though there were labels aplenty. My conclusion: “If you taste one American beer, you’ve pretty much tasted them all.”

At that time I had tasting notes for some 120 beers from across the U.S. and other countries. I was fairly well educated in what beers were out there in the U.S.. I searched for beers that had taste; discussed imports and the problem of shipping beer over long distances. I quoted Chicago columnist Mike Royko that American beer tasted as though it were “filtered through a horse.” When some of those brewers complained, he apologized—to the horse.

In that, and subsequent articles, I searched for American beers with taste. My northwest selections were limited to the brews of then Heileman-owned Rainier in Seattle, Pabst-owned Blitz in Portland, independent Olympia in Washington and General Brewing  in Vancouver, WA. There were few Craft Brewers in existence. My beer ratings were as follows:

No world class beers.

Fine Beer: Rainier Ale. My enthusiasm for that beer is embarrassing, as I read it now: “Rainier Ale has the good taste of English ales and is only slightly inferior to such greats as Bass and Worthington (and much cheaper).” Hey, what did I know?  The imported English Bass of that era was rather pathetic, and Rainier was better then than now, although it was what our brewers called bastard ale (i.e. bottom fermented warm at 70F and aged as a lager at 40F. Rainier at that time had an OG of 15P/1060, 7 percent ABV, with only 30 percent corn grits. Half of the malted barley was 2-row Klages and Peroline, the other half 6-row Larker and Beacon, and hopped with Yakima Cluster hop pellets.

My second choice was Blitz Old English 800 Malt Liquor, which also had better taste in those days. I said it had “the rich full taste of an ale if not the color, with an impressive English hop bouquet.” At that time Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve was being touted as a great beer, but my third choice  was Heileman’s Mickey’s Malt Liquor * from Seattle, followed by Henry’s, which I panned as being nothing more than a higher class smoother Blitz-Weinhard. At least my opinion of that beer is not embarrassing to me now.

I reveled in the opportunity to blast the cursed big brewers and what they had done to my beer. I babbled on somewhat incoherently about American beer, which I labeled “yellow industrial swill,” made from the regular Reinheitsgebot ** ingredients plus such “cereals as corn, rice, oats, rye, unmalted barley, sorghum and soy beans, and which may be in the form of flour, coarse ground grain, steam rolled and pressed grains, (or) chemically leached cereals such as grits. To these may be added any of the 59 other chemicals and ingredients then approved by the FDA.” The product was called “malt beverage and has been known to appear in such soda pop flavors as raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime…(and) fermented and aged for as little as two weeks…and (thoroughly filtered to) remove most of the…‘good’ taste of beer your grandfather may remember.” I concluded: “One of our beverages is missing—beer!”

When I reviewed California beers of that time, I found great beer at the two smallest American breweries: Anchor and New Albion. I noted that Anchor brand Steam Beer was world class, “probably the best regular beer made in the U.S., and one of the best in the world,” which, along with Anchor Porter and Old Foghorn, made a great marketing coup in the tiny good-beer sweepstakes of the time. At the same time, in Sonoma’s New Albion Brewery, Jack McAuliffe and Suzy Stern made two  fine beers: New Albion Ale and Stout. I wrote, “there are no other California Fine beers.” In later issues I praised  Ballantine’s Old India Pale Ale, the only remaining American IPA from the 19th century, and such imports as Pilsner Urquel, Die Kirch Malt Liquor (Luxembourg), Dortmunder Ritterbrau, Pinkus Alt, San Miguel Dark and Old Peculier Yorkshire Ale. I declared that if the reader wished to sample one of the newly popularized “lite” beers, it would be cheaper and simpler to add ice cubes to one’s regular beer.

Aside from Prohibition, those were the darkest hours of American beer and we can look back on them with a smile. But it is well to remember the struggle to return the country to decent beer and remind ourselves that those who remain ignorant of history may be compelled to repeat it.

The craft brewing movement was brought about by the actions of Boulder, CO-based Charlie Papazian’s enthusiastic support of good quality homebrewing. He was teaching homebrewers to use some of the procedures and methods I had written about in my 1969 book, Treatise on Lager Beers. His classes produced a good number of homebrewers making some very nice brews. It wasn’t much longer before homebrewers started to build small commercial breweries.  These came to be called microbreweries until they began to be successful as larger operations. We call them craft brewers these days. American style craft brewing has spread across the world. Papazian and his group are responsible for changing the very nature of the world’s brewing industries. Craft brewing has spread across Asia, and now seems to be invading many other areas.

The enemy has not given up, and  they continue production and shipment to Europe and Asia, where young people are taking to drinking American yellow industrial swill, while the Coors-Bud-Millers mob is displacing some wonderful traditional German, British and Belgian beers. We are winning the revolution, but this is not the time to relax our vigilance. In 1978, the enemy didn’t even know we existed, now they do for certain.

*In those days regular “beer” was required to have an alcohol content of under 5 percent ABV, while malt liquor was anything over that.
**The Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, limiting beer to malted barley, hops, and water. Yeast hadn’t been discovered at that time, but was certainly included.

The post In The Beginning, One Of Our Beverages Had Disappeared first appeared on All About Beer.

But there are some considerable differences. UT is a huge campus, and we crawled about campus constantly consulting paper maps trying to find our classes during that first week.  My boy has a UT app on his iPhone, which maps out where each class is relative to his current position using GPS. I had to run around campus signing up for the classes I wanted to take. He merely sat as his laptop and registered. I wrote my class notes on notebook paper, and typed my papers on an actual typewriter. He will take his laptop to class and print his papers out on a color printer the size of a shoebox. Damn kids these days. They have it easy.

To add insult to injury, the choice of beers in the local grocery store and the choice of taps available in Sixth Street bars will be much better for him. My son (when he turns 21, of course), will have so many diverse beers available to him that, yes, I admit it makes me jealous. Back in 1987, the choices were Bud, Miller Lite, Coors Light, Corona, and Heineken. Today there is of course a rainbow of craft beers—both local and from afar.   Young adults today see it as a given, and perhaps are unaware how far we’ve come, as an industry, from that point to this.  To say the least, it was not an easy or quick transition for an industry that’s been doing things pretty much the same way since the repeal of Prohibition (may the gods bless it).

One could make the legitimate case that the rapid growth and availability of craft beers is driven by consumers. Efficient marketplaces, we are told in economics, must always adapt themselves to the Vox Publica. The people’s desires will be served. But what may not surprise you is that the strongest players in any industry dominated by a few well-capitalized companies can strongly affect the public’s desires—in our case through a saturation of the airwaves, controlling of distribution, shelf space and taps, and through a systematic domination of sports, that all-important doorway to the average young man’s heart and soul.

And I’m sure you’re shocked, shocked to learn that even some borderline dirty tricks were employed. On Oct. 13, 1996, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president of communications took Jim Koch and Sam Adams Boston Lager to task on “Dateline NBC” for being brewed under contract in Pittsburgh. A-B also filed a complaint with the BATF during that time against Pete’s Wicked Ale, citing language on the label describing the beer as being brewed “one batch at a time,” even though each batch was 400 barrels.   And then in March 1996, A-B announced to its distributors that they would now be giving A-B its “total commitment” in the form of exclusivity—in other words, it informed their distributors that they would only carry A-B products, with penalties for noncompliance. At the time Brandweek said that A-B was trying to  “legally squash competitors.”

And it wasn’t just A-B:  Miller Brewing Co., Coors Brewing Co., and Heineken USA (called Van Munching & Co. at the time), while not demanding that their distributors jettison craft brands, “strongly encouraged” their distributors not to take on competing brands.

And then you had the cultural differences. If distributorship owners were from Mars, craft brewers were from Venus. Distributors tended to be old-fashioned, buttoned-down, wearing ties, Republican. Craft brewers wore sandals, ironic T-shirts, and were Communists. Exceptions are to be seen on both sides, of course, but stereotypes help bring order to our understanding of the world.

Add it all up, and it’s any wonder Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada ever got to market.

My how times have changed. As the big brands’ growth has stalled out and craft and imports have grown, distributors have been obliged to open their doors and seek out new brands to carry, big brewers be damned. Almost overnight, craft brewers went from begging for meetings with distributors to being actively courted by distributors. In addition, there’s been a generational change at distributorships as Gen X and Millennials are taking over the management and ownership. And while they may not wear ironic T-shirts, at least they get the jokes.

First, Miller and Coors distributors started adding craft brands like gangbusters, seeing that they were not only growing and increasing in popularity, but they also brought larger margins to their coffers. As for A-B distributors, a few eschewed exclusivity. But then in the fall of 2007, A-B’s largest distributor, Ben E. Keith in Texas, decided to forgo exclusivity to take on craft brands. After that, A-B distributors broke out of jail in droves. And there was an added benefit: Distributors were starting to talk about the beer again, instead of just “boxes.”

The dynamic had changed forever. The industry was now more aligned with satisfying demand. Craft brewers have arrived.

But the narrative that craft brewers were held down by large brewers is an old and well-worn story (see the movie “Beer Wars”). But, as with most narratives, it’s more complicated than a simple David and Goliath story. In fact, the big breweries did craft brewers a very important favor when they not only did not oppose, but also actively supported the small brewer federal excise tax break. This tax break was and is crucial in giving craft brewers a start. So even while big brewers did much to attempt to thwart small brewers, they also did them a good turn early on. And today, the relations between large and small brewers are much improved from in the 1990s. While small brewers still view big brewers, and their brands that appear to be craft brands, as tremendous threats, all brewers big and small are working closely together for common goals.

But make no mistake: Even as craft brewers have broken the glass ceiling of acceptance among distributors and retailers, it’s still a tough road to market. Distributors today carry so many beer brands that it’s sometimes difficult for small brewers to get the focus they want on their brands. Consider this: A wholesaler may carry brands from 15 craft brewers. When a salesman from that distributor goes into a bar with six taps, of which he gets only three, which beers does he put on tap?  That’s a harder question that you would think. And the answer often depends on which brewer has built the best relationship with the distributor, or has provided the most selling materials, or has already established a relationship with the bar owner, or a myriad other factors. That’s why they say it’s much easier to sell your beer locally, because at least you have the home-field advantage and probably have local relationships.

So when my son comes of age in Austin in a few years, he will enjoy a wide selection of quality craft beers. It’s been a long hard road to get to this point, and the industry still has challenges ahead. But I look forward to that day when I can take my son to the Saucer, order a nice Imperial Stout, and tell him the story of how craft beer changed an industry.

The post Change We Can Believe In first appeared on All About Beer.

There was an American who had studied all he could find about bull fighting, he’d read everything and examined all the videos, so he wrote a book and declared himself an “expert” on bull fighting. Soon, he traveled off to Spain to reap the rewards of being an author and an expert. The Spanish bull fighting aficionados welcomed him with open arms, and took him to the great arena. The spectacle was an extraordinary one, the first he had actually witnessed, he was hooked, he was an author, he was an expert and he discussed it with his new friends, using all the right terms. They were proud of him and took him to a great restaurant catering to such people. At the dinner’s main course, the chef brought out a huge dish bearing the two monstrous tokens of the bull’s enormous power center. Our expert devoured them with great gusto.

The next day, his new friends took him to the same restaurant, where the chef again delivered his specialty, but this time the power centers were rather small and a bit insipid, and when our expert inquired as to why this was so, he was told: “Señor, the bool does not always lose.”

Beer is my passion, but I am often called an “expert” in this field, a label I am very leery of accepting. I actually am an expert in swimming (I know, for example that swimming is not swimming, but rather it is flying in the water, and only an expert in swimming could tell you that), yet I have problems with that title in the field of beer. I am not nearly as knowledgeable about beer and alcohol.

Don’t call me “connoisseur” (“common sewer”?) either, I’m a reformed photographer-cum-swim coach, connoisseur-manship is almost an oxymoron in the face of that. Connoisseurs are fussbudgets, moderate in their own way, but never satisfied, whereas I am in love with the beer in my hand, any beer. For me, moderation fades in the presence of chocolate and beer (or ice cream and beer) and I’ve never met a beer festival that I didn’t immediately fall in love with.

I also write about saké, but let me tell you I can never be a saké connoisseur either. On my last trip to Japan, I met Mr. Mitsugu Yamasei, of Osaka, who is a true saké connoisseur, if there ever was one. He is a registered master taster (saké sommelier), having won and placed high in many saké-tasting competitions. His exploits in this field are well documented. He told me there is an old Japanese saying: “A true saké connoisseur eats fish wombs.” Ah, well….

Oh, and spare me the epitaph Beer Guru, my halo sometimes gets lost in the crush of the grain. I’ve also been called a “leader” in the beer business, but I read somewhere that leadership is just nature’s way of ridding the work force of morons and incompetents.

But what is an expert anyway? Some would say that an expert is a person who learns more and more about less and less until finally he knows everything about nothing. In my case I seem to be going in the opposite direction. My information is getting thinner and thinner, even as it piles higher and higher on my desk. As far as that goes, there are others who might point out that an expert is an “ex-spurt,” a former spurt. As I said, my passion is beer and I think I will stick with being a Beer Enthusiast.

I don’t seem to be journalist either; what I do is not journalism. My journalism professor (at the University of Washington) was quick to inform me that I would never be a journalist (too many “I’s” and “you’s,” too many opinions, too many parenthesis, not enough facts). He was perfectly correct. I am not a journalist and never wanted to be one, I am an artist (my medium is words), and more recently a beer writer. Perhaps some of it is technical or semi-technical, but mostly it is art, an art over which I seem to have little control. My writing is very unorthodox, reflecting neither good grammar nor proper organization. Habitually I am long-winded, opinionated and long-worded, but of course that’s what essayists are supposed to be. My sole redeeming grace seems to be that my readers know I am opinionated. What I do is appreciated by a significant group of readers.

I was listening to the car radio (PBS), and heard a story about a well-known, highly regarded poet, whose name I can’t remember and whose work was considered, by critics, as “bad.” His book(s?) were popular particularly among the working class, because (according to this critic) they all figured they could do better, and would, just as soon as they got around to it.

For me this was an epiphany, I suddenly realized that was true of my beer writing! It’s bad, but the people who like my work are like that; they all know they can do better and will, just as soon as they get around to it! This is a classic example of the procrastination factor at work. I know the feeling, because it took me 40 years to get a “round tuit” myself.

There may even be those churlish individuals who would call me a public drunk. Yes, and I don’t always get the glass to my mouth, either, which was a surprise for me, the first time it happened. My old Sunday School teacher had taught us 14-year-old boys the proper names for a lot of interesting body parts and of some fascinating human activities, but he particularly warned us that no matter how much beer a man drank, he would never miss his mouth. He probably meant that as a warning against the evils of drink, but we took it as gospel. It wasn’t until years later when I discovered that not only could I miss my mouth, but I miss it quite regularly, slobbering beer all over my shirtfront and trousers on many occasions. The man had promised us that would never happen; I was completely disillusioned, my childhood dreams totally shattered.

As I said, my passion is beer and I think I will stick with being a Beer Enthusiast, but if Michael Jackson was the Beer Hunter, then maybe, just maybe, I might also be a Beer Surfer—I don’t really want it all anymore, I just want the good stuff!

The post How I Became A Beer Surfer first appeared on All About Beer.