Recently, my young friend Alyssa and I had a date for that now ubiquitous wonderful American tradition—Sunday brunch. Where to go? We considered and discarded a half-dozen places before deciding on Freetail Brewing Co., a pizza-centered brewpub and production brewery here in San Antonio. This was the choice even though my dining companion was on the record about her dislike of beer. Still, we went, had a nice lunch, and when she tasted my Local Coffee Stout, she said, “Wow, that’s really good. Get me one.”

Back in the day, when you wanted to start a brewery, you typically rented space in the cheapest, seediest industrial part of town, built the brewery, signed up distributors and courted retailers, and started selling beer to an admiring and thirsty public. Where legal, you might’ve added a little hospitality area where people could try your beers.

More and more today that model is ass-backward. With shelves getting crowded and it becoming harder to sell beer outside of your community, the “taproom first, packaging brewery later” model seems to be the one to adopt.

For Scott Metzger, the owner of Freetail Brewing Co., this model was forced upon him before it became de haut en bas due to the stringent laws in Texas at the time, which prohibited breweries with taprooms from selling off-premises.

“I thought, well I just do what Sam Calagione [of Dogfish Head] did in Delaware and change the law,” he says. “It was actually part of my business plan.” But what he thought would take a year ended up taking four years, as it took time for politically powerful distributors in the state to catch on that this could be a good thing for overall beer consumption.

And as similar legal restraints have loosened in many states across the country, taprooms at production breweries have blossomed into a multi-million-dollar business.

And the model makes sense: Taprooms can be very profitable. As Scott tells me, “In some ways I was lucky, because if I had tried to build a packaging brewery first, my odds of succeeding would’ve been much lower. The brewpub was profitable almost immediately, and it allowed us to show we were a real and thriving business when it came time to raise money for the packaging brewery.”

So profitable, in fact, that it has caught the attention of the world’s largest brewery, Anheuser-Busch InBev. Every brewery recently purchased by AB InBev has a thriving taproom business, and that’s not an accident. The Brewers Association estimates that taprooms can make as much as $400 a keg in gross profit.

But it’s not just about profitability. Meg Gill, president of Los Angeles’ Golden Road Brewing Co.—which was recently purchased by Anheuser-Busch—says it’s also about the “experiential marketing.”

“Think about the marketing ROI of taprooms,” she says. “Bringing people in to have an amazing experience with your beers—and pairing them with great food in some cases—it’s the best way to build long-term equity. It’s marketing that you actually make money on.” Like Metzger, she says that back in leaner days, her taprooms/pubs “paid for the expansion of our packaging brewery. It’s a lot easier going to a bank and asking for money when your pubs are making you profitable.”

Then she drops the greatest reason for a taproom, and I ask you to think of my friend Alyssa. “Taprooms and brewpubs provide a higher conversion rate of non-beer drinkers to beer drinkers than any other form of marketing, in my view. If somebody is watching a Bud Light or Miller Lite ad on TV who doesn’t drink beer, they’re probably not going to rush out and buy beer. But if you get that same person into your pub with their friends and they try a nitro stout and they love it, you’ve just created a new beer drinker.”

But not everybody is thrilled about the popularity of taprooms. For one thing, it places brewers in direct competition with the on-premise retailers who are also their customers, which can create some tension. John Taylor, president of J.J. Taylor, a large distributor in Florida, says, “Cigar City is the largest on-premise beer bar in their market.” How does that make the pub down the street feel? In markets like San Diego, Portland and Minneapolis, brewery-owned taprooms dominate the on-premise beer landscape. Taylor estimates that 20 percent of on-premise beer sales in the Twin Cities are through taprooms.

There are also internal industry fears about maintaining a level playing field. There’s a reason the three-tier system was put into place: to prevent the pre-Prohibition domination of the industry by a few well-funded players. With AB InBev increasingly buying both craft breweries with taprooms and distributorships as laws are relaxed, we are again seeing a dominate player reign in all three-tiers, which could eventually provide fewer avenues to market for smaller craft brewers than an independent three-tier system.

But that didn’t stop Alyssa from having two more coffee stouts.

RELATED: Three-Tier Dynamics

The post The Rise of Taprooms first appeared on All About Beer.

Editor’s note: This article appeared in our January issue, and several additional acquisitions and consolidations have occurred since it was written.

Buckle your seat belts. The speed at which sales are happening across the beer industry is frightening, and earlier this summer I had a front seat to one of the more talked-about acquisitions. I was in Mexico, summoned there by Meg Gill, one of the co-founders of Golden Road Brewing of Los Angeles. She wanted to share news that was about to break.

“I’m getting align-ed,” she said in a fake Portuguese accent, “with the Brazeelians!” She was selling out to Anheuser-Busch InBev. Or more specifically AB InBev was buying out two of her three partners, while she and CFO Paul Burgis reinvested most of their portions back into the company and will stay on.

Knowing Meg is a free spirit who doesn’t take commands well from higher-ups, I asked, “Why would you do such an incomprehensible thing?” She shot back, “It was your f__ing idea.” (I had visited the brewery a few months earlier and mentioned offhand, “AB would probably be really interested in a joint like this.”) She continued: “It was the right time for our partners, and I honestly believe in AB’s vision for craft beer in California.”

Such is the future—nay, the present—of beer. Just in the last year, we’ve seen AB InBev buy Blue Point, 10 Barrel Brewing, Elysian Brewing and Virtue Cider, and now Golden Road. MillerCoors has bought a stake in Saint Archer. Firestone Walker sold to Duvel Moortgat. Founders sold a 30 percent stake to Spain’s Mahou San Miguel, and Lagunitas sold a 50 percent stake to Heineken. Constellation Beer is in the hunt for a craft brewer, as is Diageo-Guinness USA and Pabst. And those investments are the ones we know about. Tony Magee at Lagunitas told me that there are “likely hundreds of brewers who have taken private equity money to fuel growth, but they just don’t publicize it because they don’t have to.”

That, my friends, is the dirty little secret of the craft beer industry. Rob Tod of Allagash told me that once you start growing above about 40 percent a year, in the absence of some pretty significant trade-offs, “it’s awfully tough to continue to finance with traditional bank debt for extended periods. Just too capital-intensive a business.” So, after some time, brewers either need to slow things down or seek alternate funds like outside equity.

Building out brewing capacity, it turns out, is very expensive. Once you start growing big, bank debt can’t even keep up with the cost of building capacity. So unless you have a very rich uncle or an angel investor, “selling out” to private equity or a big brewer suddenly becomes a viable option. In fact, if you ranked the fastest-growing U.S. craft brewers you can bet that those brewers have or will soon require private equity money or endure an acquisition.

For those older stalwart brewers who don’t go either route, we’re seeing the founders prepare for the next generation of ownership. Sierra Nevada and Bell’s have active children of founders in the business. Others are handing off their legacies to their employees, like Harpoon and Left Hand.

Increasingly, private equity is getting into the game, including Oskar Blues, SweetWater, Abita and countless others. Depending on which private equity firm is behind a brewery, certainly some or most of them will want a payback within a certain time frame. When that time frame comes up, who will be holding the bag when these breweries come up for sale? I smell a secondary bubble, or at least a secondary big wave of consolidation.

What does this mean for the consumer? Tough to say. If belts suddenly need to get tightened because the money people are involved and demand softens, we could see lapses in quality. If demand remains robust and consumers continue to demand variety it behooves these better-funded companies to provide them. The key is the people—both consumers and the brewers—remain connected despite where the equity for the equipment comes from. Social media is the force that makes up the difference between this capacity scramble and the one in the late 1990s. But that doesn’t mean we will be immune to another shakeout of sorts. There is only so much shelf space and so many tap handles, and with 4,000 breweries and another 1,000 in planning, once the music stops there are sure to be more brewery closures in our future. Profits and returns still matter, even in the craft beer business.

The post It’s The End Of Craft Beer As We Know It first appeared on All About Beer.

Here’s a fun fact: There’s an awful lot of sleeping around within the beer industry: craft brewers sleeping with distributors, distributors sleeping with big brewers, big brewers even sleeping with craft brewers (so dirty) and what-have-you. Even beer journalists get in on the Dionysian revelry—I myself have carried on various trysts with craft brewers, big brewers, distributors and even a retailer—not wanting to favor any particular tier as an honest journalist. (I am happy to report that this particular bar owner and I are still the best of friends. The others … I really don’t wish to talk about it.)

Many of these beer business dalliances end up in long-term dating relationships and marriages, and then beer babies inevitably arrive with names like Porter and Amber, the latter of which we work hard to keep off the brass pole. I am actually a beer baby. Well, actually my mother was in the soft-drink business, so I suppose I’m not a purebred beer baby—more like the beverage equivalent of a Mudblood.

I suspect that beer people often end up with other beer people for four reasons: 

1. The beer business never sleeps. Beer people keep unusual hours—we wake up early to service the off-premises (grocery and convenience stores) and we stay out late servicing the on-premises (bars and restaurants). So if you are married to somebody who is not in the industry, these hours can be trouble.

2. Many beer people are also on the road most of the time, because beer is sold everywhere, not just in the town where your house happens to be. In fact, I am writing this column at the Pappadeaux restaurant in the basement of Terminal A at the DFW airport. If you’re not putting 25,000 miles on your car a year or don’t earn the top-tier miles status on your preferred airline, you’re not doing it right. Beer people travel, a lot.

3. Beer people, by nature and necessity, are fun people. Adolphus Busch famously made Anheuser-Busch’s motto “Making friends is our business.” He said it for a reason. Beer is associated with fun, and to sell beer you need to be a fun person. Debbie Downers need not apply. If you’re not a people person, perhaps Procter & Gamble could use you to sell toilet paper. And naturally, fun people attract other fun people, and so there are inevitable hook-ups. (Here’s a great startup idea for a young entrepreneur:  A Tinderlike app that hooks up beer industry people—you could call it Beernder. You’re welcome).

4. We drink a lot. Enough said.

But before you think that the beer industry is a constant parade of orgies, let me warn you that it’s not all fun and games, particularly lately. In my 20-some-odd years in covering this great industry from the inside, I’ve never seen the level of bickering we are experiencing today. The beer industry of today has turned into a clique of teenagers who have turned on each other even though they were best friends. Craft brewers are sparring with distributors, big brewers are sparring with craft brewers, and even some retailers are sparring with craft brewers. I liked it better when we all just slept with each other.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. Recently the distributors held a legislative conference in Washington, D.C., in which the craft brewers usually host an opening reception. This year they declined, and the big brewers stepped in and hosted the reception. Why? Because the big brewers and the small brewers have competing federal tax-reduction bills in front of Congress, and the distributors threw their support with the big brewers. I won’t bore you with any more details than that because it’s already well-trodden ground, but the tension at that confab was palpable.

Here’s another: At that same meeting, outgoing MillerCoors CEO Tom Long made some comments about the three-tier system—the flow of beer from brewer to distributor to retailer, which is mandated by law in many states. “The three-tier system works,” he said to a crowd of mostly distributors. He added, “The only real threat to the beer industry is the threat to state-based regulation of the three-tier system brought about by craft brewers.”

In response, the Brewers Association (representing craft brewers) chief, Bob Pease, wrote to me to point out that “craft brewers appreciate the value of the three-tier system and have no intention of breaking it or tearing it down,” but that “the right to sell beer to beer drinkers at a brewery is a fundamental part of most craft brewers’ business plans” and that craft brewers started with “self-distribution, as brewpubs or with a taproom. These companies began with different business models and grew to generate millions of barrels of opportunity with their distributor partners as they succeeded and outgrew their original footprints.” Indeed, although there’s not a lot of data on the topic, craft brewery tap rooms selling directly to beer drinkers is one of the fastest-growing channels of beer sales.

Regarding the topic of self-distribution, craft brewers obviously want to have the ability to distribute their own beers in their own markets. Sounds reasonable, right? It’s illegal in many states, so craft guilds are working to change those “archaic” laws. Distributors for the most part agree with it in theory, but here’s the catch: Big brewers like Anheuser-Busch are using the argument that if small brewers can self-distribute, why can’t they? They’ve fought battles in Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois using this argument. The problem is if Anheuser-Busch InBev is successful in buying distributorships and bringing them in-house, it reduces the choices craft brewers have to get to market. It’s a double-edged sword. My take: Let’s let the lawyers figure it out and go out and have a beer or three.

Here’s one more: I recently dined with a prominent craft brewer whose name you would probably know if you know craft brewers. I asked him if he was going to the Craft Brewers Conference in Portland. He didn’t skip a beat. “No way,” he said. “It’s gotten too big and it’s full of [expletive deleted] who all think they invented beer.” I admit his response surprised me. The craft beer industry has typically been such a tight-knit community, sharing hops and doing collaborations with each other. It’s still that way for the most part, but there seems to be an underlying tension between the new “third-generation” brewers and the larger brewers.

So where does this leave us? The beer industry has evolved into two beer industries:  A craft beer industry that is increasingly breaking down legal barriers that once prevented activities like filling growlers, hosting tap rooms and self-distributing, and a traditional beer industry that allows for an independent middle tier that can’t be controlled by the big brewers. It largely depends on the state, because the federal government largely gave up on alcohol regulation after the failed experiment of Prohibition. But the lines are blurring, and I suspect we’ll see more sharp elbows between the players in this industry before we see a clear path ahead.

I just hope we’ll keep sleeping with each other.

The post Let’s Stay Together first appeared on All About Beer.

On a warm February night 20 years ago, I found myself at an establishment in west Houston drinking beers with my boss and several top executives from Heineken.

I was a wide-eyed 25-year-old greenhorn—a middling sales guy at a large beer distributorship—and I remember just being honored that I was invited to tag along with such prestigious beer men. (Yes, they were all men. I don’t recall many women in the beer industry back then outside of telephone sales.)

We all wore dark suits, white button-down shirts and either red or blue ties, the uniform of the beer executive back then. The establishment happened to be a topless joint called the Trophy Club, and it was not uncommon to entertain visiting brewery executives there. I recall one of the executives turning to me and saying, “Don’t you love the beer business?” Indeed. (Philip Van Munching would later write about this night in his book, Beer Blast.)

That anecdote makes me think of the Super Bowl halftime show my senior year in high school in 1987. I was at my grandfather’s house watching the game and drinking Lone Star with him. I was only 18, but he didn’t seem to be concerned about contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Anyway, Disney had produced the halftime extravaganza, and it featured several Disney characters marching around the field to such old classics as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Yes, the Super Bowl halftime shows have come a long, long way since then. Can you imagine Snow White having a wardrobe malfunction?

But the real kicker of that show was when the ancient comedian George Burns was trotted out to start the festivities. After Snow White tells the audience who he is, he says: “A pretty gal. But a little too old for me.” The audience roared with laughter. My grandfather had tears in his eyes. Can you imagine the uproar on Twitter if some old guy said that about Katy Perry in this year’s game?

You may at this point be wondering what the point of these two unconnected anecdotes is, or indeed if this column has any point. Stick with me here. My point is that the attitudes, values, beliefs and standards change quite dramatically from decade to decade. Even Anheuser-Busch executives wear blue jeans daily to the office, and I doubt anybody at Heineken would be caught dead in a topless bar (at least not with business associates. At least that’s what the dancers tell me—not that I frequent those establishments … much).

While it was common to entertain that way in the 1990s when I was getting started, (the tail end of the three-martini-lunch era), we also dressed much more formally. It’s interesting to me that we had stricter dress codes back then yet it was perfectly acceptable to make sexist jokes during the Super Bowl.

Old men tend to pine for the old days, but I don’t miss much about that era, because back then things that didn’t matter tended to matter. Business norms that were pointless in my view had to be observed. I didn’t like wearing a tie and coat in 100-degree weather, but I did. I didn’t like having to read and forward inter-office memos (in the manila folder with string tie, remember?), but I did. And I didn’t like that our beloved industry—the best industry in the world, then and now—was overrun with men. White men. Stupid white men in many cases. I know because I am one.

You can make the case that the beer business back then was chauvinistic. A good case, actually. But I also think the industry itself reflected the demographic it was targeting. It was a foregone conclusion back then that beer was for men. Women didn’t drink beer; it was inconceivable that they would. It’s bitter, it’s fattening, it makes you burp. Of course, millennial women turn that assumption on its end and routinely drink the hoppiest double IPA and burp with abandon. I know, because I date one.

And we must thank the beer gods that women today do drink beer. I remember an executive at Diageo, one of the largest wine and spirits companies, making a speech 10 or so years ago and declaring that the reason spirits were kicking beer’s butt is that they know how to market to women and we didn’t. It was valid criticism—and still is to this day. But it’s getting better. Back in about 2005, beer marketing hit a chauvinistic low (but aesthetic high) when Miller Lite aired a TV ad called “Catfight.” It featured two attractive women, one a light blonde and one a brunette, who get into a fight about whether Miller Lite tasted great or was less filling, and they end up wrestling in a fountain in their leopard-print underwear. Today Miller Lite airs ads about the three varieties of hops they use in the brewing process.

When I look out over the vast crowd at the Craft Brewers Conference or an Anheuser-Busch sales and marketing meeting, I get a little ball of warmth in my heart to see so much more diversity. It makes sense, because as an industry we need to reflect the people who buy our products. We’re still not there yet as an industry, but we’re definitely making progress.

When I have lunch soon with Heineken USA CEO Dolf van den Brink, it will not be at a topless bar. It will be at a beer-centric establishment, and neither of us will be wearing a tie, and we’ll be accompanied by his senior vice president and chief corporate relations officer, Stacey Tank. She’s a woman, by the way. This to me is the greatest victory of all.

The post I Don’t Miss the Good Old Days first appeared on All About Beer.

I had my first tastes of beer as a child early on Saturday mornings. My grandfather—whom we all called Poopsie for some reason—was a prodigious beer drinker. And when I say prodigious, I mean he started drinking beer on Saturday mornings at around 7 o’clock. He’d wake up at 6, eat a big pile of eggs and bacon and biscuits with enough butter on them to sink a battleship and grab a cold brew from his dedicated beer fridge. He’d then head outside to water the grass with a hose. He had automatic sprinklers, but he claimed that watering with a hose made the grass happier than a sprinkler could and saved on the water bill. (He also never turned on the A/C in his car, even when it was 100-plus degrees, as he was always “saving it.” The Great Depression really screwed with that generation’s collective psyche.) As a kid, I was dumb enough to buy this line of poppycock (a word he often used). I now suspect he used the activity of watering the grass with a hose to make his morning beer drinking halfway legit. And to get away from my grandmother, who was a real piping shrew.

But Poopsie was a gem of a person. I adored him because he adored me, and so I would follow him around for hours like a shadow, and he would let me take sips of his beer. It wasn’t until I got older that I learned that drinking beer in the morning outside of Germany was generally frowned upon by the conservative burghers of Texas. But, as Poopsie used to say, “If they can’t take a joke, screw ’em.”

When I was a kid, Poopsie drank Lone Star. As I became a teen, he switched to Budweiser. When I was in high school, he switched to Miller Lite. His beer choices reflected the tastes of the time, although I note for the record that he skipped the clear-beer craze (He used to say that the only thing he knows about Zima “is that it zucks). If Poopsie were alive today, I suspect he’d be throwing back a Lagunitas IPA or a Modelo Especial.

When I think of all the trends in beer throughout my 45 years, we’ve been through quite a few iterations. When I was a child, regional brands like Lone Star, Rainier, and Old Style dominated the landscape. Then cheap transportation and national television ads ushered in the era of big brands like Budweiser, Schlitz and Miller High Life. Then the health craze ushered in the greatest trend of them all, light beers like Miller Lite, ­Coors Light and Bud Light. All along, like an old man with gout, there were little flare-ups like ice beer and dry beer and, yes, clear beer. But the one thing that always remained consistent, until today, is that beer IBUs and alcohol content got lower and lower.

Thinking back on the beer industry of the last 45 years, there have been three distinct eras:

1969-1981: Rotary phone era. This post-war period of the expansion of the American middle class is characterized by rapid volume growth in the beer industry and the rise of national brands and the squeezing of local breweries. The number of Americans turning 21 rises each year dramatically as baby boomers turned of age and beer sales rose accordingly.

1982-2007: Era of the brick mobile phone. Here we see the decline of full-calorie premium domestics, completely and almost identically offset by the rise of premium lights. Total beer volumes start to flatten out as the number of kids turning 21 still grows but moderates.

2007-2014: Era of the smart phone. This is a big shift to a new time in our industry, as premium lights flatten out and start their decline (losing 135 million cases over the last six years) and a new type of drinker is coming of age: millennials. Overall volumes start declining as the number of new drinkers turning 21 flattens out. This trend will likely continue unabated through 2025, suggests Bruce Jacobson, vice president of sales—beer division for Constellation Brands (importer of Corona Extra and Modelo Especial). Bruce estimates that by 2025, 200 million cases of beer will bleed away from domestic premiums like Bud and Miller Lite and will be up for grabs. While the number of 21-year-olds entering the market will be flat, the number of Hispanic consumers will increase by 36 percent. Millennials and Hispanics will drive the beer industry.

Given these facts, what will the beer industry look like in 2025? As you know if you are reading this magazine, the growth in the beer industry today is in craft beer. It’s all about local; it’s all about more flavor and higher alcohol (even session crafts have more alcohol than light beers). From 80 breweries in 1985 to 3,000 today, the industry is going back to its local roots. Taps on the typical back bar today resemble an elaborate Chinese fan. It’s a good thing.

But there is still a large segment of the population who prefer lighter pilsners, to the tune of 70 percent of the population if you’re going by market share. Next to craft, the fastest-growing segment of the beer industry is Mexican imports. The rise in the Hispanic population will only serve to maintain and accelerate this trend.

When future Harry goes into a bar in 2025, with a full head of flowing hair and buff as a swimmer because they will invent a double-sided pill by then to accomplish both, and the robot barmaid with the simulated raspy smoker’s voice and simulated frizzy blond hair asks me for my order, what will I be drinking? Will it be whole-grain mead? Kale cider? Or will the beer be instantly brewed to taste in the guts of the robot waitress? (Now that’s hyper-local.)

I suspect it will be one of three things: a local craft, a national craft from a big brewer, or a Mexican import. I’ll add a fourth option: a light beer if I’m feeling ironic. My grandfather will be up in heaven, watering the clouds with a hose to get away from my grandmother, drinking a Dos Equis.

The post The Next Big Thing first appeared on All About Beer.

What struck me about this funny clip is that it almost isn’t even satire, especially in Portland.

This reminds me of a story. Last summer I was in Paris for work and was sitting at the bar in the Hotel Le Meurice unsuccessfully trying to make the bartender understand that I wanted a bourbon and soda. I texted my French friend asking her how to order a bourbon and soda in French and she texted back, “Jack and Perrier.”

These two anecdotes point toward two seemingly mutually exclusive mega-trends shaping the consumer landscape: localization and globalization. Consumers—yes, especially young consumers who are members of that quirky tribe called Millennials—want their locally raised chicken fed locally grown hazelnuts, but they also want to Instagram a picture of Colin after he’s been roasted over a flame of locally grown sustainable bamboo, from their Samsung Galaxy S phone, a global product from an almost faceless corporation if there ever was one. The incongruity would be almost laughable if it wasn’t so sad. (After all, Colin would likely be happier to be sacrificed to feed a Millennial if he were kept cooped up in an industrial poultry farm rather than dying after happily running around a woodland field.)

Certain consumer products lend themselves to being sourced locally—like chickens, vegetables and absurd local news stories (recent headline in my local paper, the San Antonio Express-News: “Spider monkey named W.C. Fields terrorizes elderly residents”)—while others are more suitable to be global products—like smart phones, cars and absurd global news stories (recent headline in Britain’s Mirror tabloid: “The more people eat cheese the more people are killed by their bedsheets”).

In the world of alcoholic beverages, we also have the dual trend of local versus global. But here the opposing trends are drawn from several characteristics inherent in the beverages themselves: things like terroir, perishability, shipability, traditional country of origin and branding. For wine, terroir is important. So unless you live in the Sonoma or Loire valleys, the best wines typically aren’t local, and brands aren’t as important as vintages. In spirits, it’s more about branding and traditional country of origin. Tequila is from Mexico and scotch is from Scotland and bourbon is from Kentucky. And the spirits companies have been masterful at branding, so an idiot like myself will go into a bar in Paris and instead of ordering a Pernod will order a Tennessee whiskey and soda water. Wine and spirits also travel well and aren’t perishable if given a modicum of care.

But beer, well, beer is different, or should be. Longtime readers of this column will no doubt remember my first rule about beer: Beer is like a baby. It’s heavy relative to its price. And it’s perishable. And it’s delicate. It doesn’t like heat or light. And it turns sour if not properly cared for. It doesn’t travel well. For those reasons and more, beer is the perfect beverage to lend itself to locality. 

And in fact, before Prohibition and for about 20 years after its repeal, beer was largely a local affair. Growlers abounded. Before the failed curious experiment that gave us nothing but jazz and organized crime, there were more than 2,000 breweries. After Prohibition’s repeal, there were more than 700, still enough so that almost every town had a brewery. That number slowly dwindled to a low of 89 breweries in 1979. What happened? 

Louis Pasteur happened. And artificial refrigeration happened. And railroads and national TV advertising and the crimped bottle crown happened. And don’t forget post-war industrialization. With pasteurization and cold rail cars and tight crown tops allowing for the long transport of beer, coupled with televised commercials touting glamorous, sophisticated beer brands, the advent of homogenous national pilsners became de rigueur for the modern company man and his Stepford housewife. 

It wasn’t just in beer. The homogenization of products across geographical markets, which, while ensuring consistency, removed the identities inherent to individual cities or towns—the kind of identities that drew people to those places in the first place.

With a resurgence in tastes leaning toward locally sourced goods (like locally made beer), what’s old is new again—mass-marketed, consistently predictable goods have lost their charm. Young people are looking now for the kind of variety that comes with a more organic, local experience, not to mention the smaller carbon footprint that locally produced goods provide. The popularity of the slow food movement is an indicator, as is the practice of listing the sources of ingredients on menus in restaurants. The local beer scene fits perfectly into this trend, and it is a big reason why we now have 2,550 breweries in operation, with the number growing rapidly. Most of those are selling beer only in their brewpub and/or with limited draft distribution in the area.

Even the largest beer marketers recognize this. Rob Sands, the CEO of Constellation Brands, the importer of Corona Extra, told CNN Money recently, “Although the craft beer industry is growing very rapidly, it’s a very local business. It’s not clear that these brands can be extended beyond their locale.” Nor, perhaps, would they want to. 

We still have our global beer brands. Heineken, Budweiser and Stella Artois are known the world over. You can walk into almost any bar in the world and order a Heineken. But with so many local alternatives available, it’s becoming less obvious that you would.

One of the most commonly asked questions within the beer industry today is: How many new breweries can the market support? Are we becoming saturated with too many breweries opening up? The answer is: not yet, not even close. There are over 2,000 wineries in California alone. If this local thing keeps going, every community will play host to its own brewery, and that’s not such a bad thing. 

This column appears in the September 2014 issue of All About Beer Magazine. Click here for a free trial of our next issue.

The post Local Hero first appeared on All About Beer.

The Winter Olympics are finally wrapped up, leaving the impression on the outside world that no amount of plaster and whitewash can hide Mother Russia’s cracks. Hotel door knobs missing, elevators failing to open, halfpipes not smooth enough for Shaun White—chaos.

Nothing set the problems off more than the image of Vladimir Putin grimacing away from the screen as the fifth Olympic ring failed to morph from a snowflake.

This image made me think of a piece the urbane Dick Cantwell of Elysian Brewing Co. wrote in 2011 that compared the sale of Anheuser-Busch to the Belgo-Brazilian InBev to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988 and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union. That deal—which created AB InBev, by far the largest brewer in the world—marked “the end of the age of cuteness,” wrote Cantwell. “As we confront the post-beer-baron era, not only has the landscape changed, the future is ours,” meaning independent brewers.

Dick’s words proved prescient. From my perch, it has been nothing short of astounding to see the beer industry change from being dominated by three players to today watching the tail wag the dog. The rainbow of brewers sprouting up across the land has had the effect of shifting power from the few to the many, and has had a ripple effect of democratizing distributors, retailers, consumers and even the press.

To give you an indication of how far things have come, consider this mostly true story. In the age of the Beer Barons, the power in the industry was held in very few hands—people with last names like Coors, Molson, Stroh and Busch. Back then the most important meeting of the year—the big kahuna—was the Beer Institute meeting. Not because of its size (the National Beer Wholesalers annual convention and the Craft Brewers Conference are much larger), but because it’s so exclusive that only a couple hundred people attended each year, and it was the right people. For a journalist making his living covering the industry, it was crucial to attend. Naturally, I couldn’t obtain an invitation to attend, while my competitors did. The president of the Beer Institute at the time, the late Jeff Becker, called me and said, “Listen, pal, you didn’t get the bid again this year, but I’m pulling for you.” I asked him why, and he evaded my question. Later I learned why.

The godhead of the U.S. beer industry, the Beer Baron’s Beer Baron, was August Busch III. If there was any man in the world who would be considered the opposite of me, it’s that guy. He was the chairman of Anheuser-Busch when it was eventually sold to InBev, but in the previous 30 years he ran the company with an iron fist. Square-headed, steely-eyed, buzz-cut and short, Busch III fit the bill perfectly as the Teutonic Beer Baron, except he wasn’t fat or fun. He spoke in clipped, humorless sentences, constantly shooting questions at petrified underlings as he power walked on the roof of the brewery to his helicopter, which he used to commute to work to save time. He was that kind of executive.

The man garnered respect the old-fashioned way: He was terrifying to his employees and distributors. He was tough, a reputation he happened to enjoy. But you have to give credit where credit is due: No other single man ever presided over a larger organic gain in market share for beer—before or since or probably ever again.

The one and only time I ever met Busch III was at the opening of a new distributorship facility in San Antonio. As “Three Sticks,” as he was called, smiled and shook hands down a receiving line, his expression turned dull as he took me in. “Mr. Busch, I’m Harry Schuhmacher, publisher of Beer Business Daily,” I said. His eyes raked my face as he murmured that he’d “seen the paper around.” The guy next to me turned to me and said, “Well, at least he’s seen it.” It was clear Three Sticks didn’t know me from Adam, and if he had known me, I’m quite sure he wouldn’t have liked me.

But that soon changed. In an issue of Beer Business Daily, I made the editorial decision to playfully refer to Three Stick’s son, August Busch IV, who had a reputation as a playboy and was prone to scandal, as “the Ted Kennedy of the beer business.” I know, not a very clever repartee, but it was all the game I had.

The article was passed around and eventually fell into the hands of Three Sticks, who also did not find it funny and allegedly instructed folks to bar me from the Beer Institute meeting permanently, according to friends who were on the board.

After a few years I was eventually allowed to attend, but such was his power. Ironically, while my little joke about Busch IV is what allegedly got me banned, it was Busch IV himself with whom I eventually forged a relationship and who thus got me access to Anheuser-Busch. And I would say we ended up being friends of a sort for a time. Once Anheuser-Busch was sold to InBev, Busch IV became, in effect, the last Beer Baron. Or was he?

Dick Cantwell said in his piece, “We don’t really do empires.” Like the Soviet bloc being broken up into Baltic states and autonomous republics, the beer industry has become fractionalized. But that very fractionalization, with about 2,500 breweries operating this year and consumer demand remaining strong, has created a gold rush. No, not a bubble like the real-estate market in 2008, but a gold rush circa Northern California in 1849. And the winners of this gold rush will be the new Beer Barons.

With brewers buying stainless tanks as fast as they can be installed, breweries large and small are adding brewing capacity at breakneck speeds. This is good, because so far demand for beer brewed by small and independent brewers has outstripped supply. But the new prospective Beer Barons of today, to fill those shiny new tanks, are in a rush to expand distribution into new markets before distributors and retailers throw up their hands and say “nyet!” or the competition becomes so fierce that pricing starts to drop, or both.

Indeed, Lagunitas’ million-barrel capacity is close to fruition thanks to a new brewery in Chicago coming online. Others are following. New Belgium has accelerated its expansion into new states, just recently expanding into Ohio and Mississippi, with Kentucky and Hawaii up next as its new brewery in Asheville, NC, is a’building.

It’s not just the larger breweries racing to expand. Detroit-based Atwater Brewery will be in the final planning stages to construct a $15 million, 100,000-barrel facility in Austin, with the motto, “Brewed in Austin. Born in Detroit,” per Crain’s Detroit Business. The company is planning a similar brewery in North Carolina. “We have eight new markets ready to go as soon as product is available, with another five planned for 2016 and beyond,” said chief Mark Rieth, who took over at Atwater in 2005. He says he wants to grow scale enough to “become a mega-regional player.”

How many other Atwaters are out there? From talking to folks in the trade, a lot. These are the new wannabe Beer Barons. And as with perestroika in the former Soviet Union, the outcome of growth and freedom isn’t always all roses. In fact, it can go horribly wrong: Overbuilding of capacity, discounting to move beer, old beer in the market, the brewing of sub-standard beer—these are the pitfalls the new Beer Barons must guard against. This is how you end up with a snowflake that fails to morph into an Olympic ring, or a wrestler caught in an elevator, or worst of all, Shaun White criticizing the state of your halfpipe.

But there are glimmers of hope. For one, this industry is starting to get the cachet and scorching demand enjoyed by the high-end wine industry for the past 20 years, but it hasn’t attracted as many superficial millionaires and movie stars—yet. And while beer is starting to get respect in fine restaurants, it is still not considered snobby and remains as approachable as a shaggy dog. And the new Beer Barons are, for the most part, the type of people you’d want to have a beer with. To me, keeping it that way is the surest way to keep this industry vibrant and strong. Just please, don’t ban me from any meetings.

This story appears in the May issue of All About Beer Magazine. Click here for a free trial of our next issue.

The post The New Beer Barons first appeared on All About Beer.

And of the cheating tarts out there, none is more despised these days, it seems, than poor old Miller Lite. You can forgive Bud Light, who was just a friend with benefits—easy come, easy go. You can forgive Coors Light because that was just a youthful dalliance—all summers must end, right? Corona Light was just a hook-up on the beach, and Amstel Light was an uptown girl you couldn’t afford anyway. Natty Light and Keystone Light? Well those were just one-night stands and you consider yourself lucky for not getting the clap.

But Miller Lite? That’s the one you thought you’d marry for life. The one that tasted great, but was also, confoundingly, less filling. The one with half the carbs of that meathead Bud Light. The one that has “more taste.” Whatever that means.

I don’t exactly know the tipping point where it started to become uncool for even moderately dorky people to hate light beer—especially Miller Lite—but I suspect it started  on Jan. 7, 1997.

That’s the exact date when Miller Brewing Co. announced it was going to run the now-infamous “Dick” ads. Dick was a fictitious advertising exec who created inane ads. One example: A middle-aged man sees the message “twist to open” on a Miller Lite bottle cap, and he proceeds to do the Twist. The ads were universally loathed by distributors, and almost immediately Miller Lite sales started to decline. A shareholder of AB InBev once told me: Marketing is like motor oil—it can speed up your engine moving forward, or it can speed up your engine going backward. In Miller Lite’s Dick ads, the engine was in full-speed reverse. The beer never really recovered, except for a brief resurgence during the low-carb craze of 2005. Today, Miller Lite volumes are running down around six percent so far in 2013 (according to IRI scans), and is the worst performing brand in the MillerCoors portfolio by market share. Miller Lite is the light beer that is suffering the most among the Big Three, which includes Bud Light and Coors Light.

As a sidebar, I note that the “Dick” ads would probably be hailed as brilliant by today’s young beer drinkers.

My adult life has been inextricably (and inexplicably) connected with Miller Lite, for better or worse. It was the beer I sold when I used to sell beer. It was an easy brand to sell in Houston, where it was the No. 1 beer when I arrived on the scene in 1991. It sold itself, really. Within a few years it started to decline in Houston as it did in the rest of the country, and that fact pulled back the curtain and revealed that I was not a great beer salesman. So it was with the decline of Miller Lite that I “decided” to leave the distributorship and try my hand at writing. Actually it was decided for me when it was politely suggested to me that beer wholesaling maybe wasn’t my game. It was a rebirth, such as what Miller Lite now apparently needs 15 years later.

And since 1997 I’ve watched the other light beer brands join Miller Lite’s slow demise with a little bit of sadness. Oh, it’s easy to say you hate light beers. That’s as easy as punching a baby on the playground. But when you grew up selling the stuff it’s hard to see it suffer. Light beer is losing share at an alarming rate, and it’s accelerating. Light volumes are down 3.6 percent this year through mid-July, according to IRI. Premium lights are down 2.2 percent. One prominent Anheuser-Busch distributor told me, “I don’t believe beer is going away. But I believe the American light lager is in trouble. The more they [A-B and MillerCoors] push price, the more they hasten the decline.” The fact remains that there’s just not much excitement in premium light beer these days, either in the marketing or the product itself.

That’s not to say that the big brewers aren’t desperately trying. Here’s what I mean by desperate:

MillerCoors is following a throwback strategy with Miller Lite by taking the product back to its glory days of meteoric growth by introducing the original label for a limited time in early 2014. Marketing experts believe the retro-label will help middle-aged men like myself remember their youthful erections, and maybe even achieve them with Pavlovian lasciviousness. I will buy a 12-er, wistfully and limply.

Anheuser-Busch has taken yet another route. It has turned Bud Light into something that people are actually drinking: a margarita. Along with its Stra-ber-Rita, the Bud Light Lime-A-Ritas give margarita lovers something that big beer companies do particularly well: convenience. Lime-A-Rita comes in a cute 8-ounce can with a 8%, so not only is the packaging convenient, also the alcohol content will conveniently get her into that loving feeling. Ounce for ounce, the Bud Light Rita sisters are the best idea A-B has come up with since it convinced people they can win the Tour de France by drinking Michelob ULTRA.

At this point in this maddening column, you may be saying or even screaming to the page: “I really don’t care what happens to light beer. I’m a craft beer drinker!” But what happens to big light beers does matter to craft beer, at least tangentially and at the margin. It matters because if these things don’t work, light beer’s slide will likely accelerate, and an extremely profitable monolithic segment could be replaced by fractionalized flavors-of-the-month with little brand loyalty and two- or three-year brand life cycles. The former prints money for all participants in the industry and provides a rich infrastructure to get and maintain a wide variety of beers on tap and on the shelves. The latter is expensive and difficult to manage. If light beers die, craft beer quality and selection could suffer, because it takes all that volume to pay for draft line cleaners, merchandisers and quality managers. But so far, it’s my impression that nobody has cracked the code to revive light beer yet. I mean really cracked the code. The problem is the segment is so big, so you have to appeal to so many diverse people and occasions. Yes, that means you have to even appeal to morons, and since there are so many morons out there, light beer ads tend to be, well, moronic.

But whoever does crack the light beer marketing code will get very rich. I suspect the words “Hispanic”, “Female” and “Millennial” will have to be deeply understood at the very least to turn around the style.

When I say cracking the code, I mean things like “vacation in a bottle” (Corona), “active lifestyle” (Michelob ULTRA),  “Most Interesting Man” (Dos Equis), “retro-cool” (PBR), or  “Tastes Great, Less Filling” (original Lite). What the light beer guys desperately need is new ideas.

Time has taken the luster off light beer. It’s due for a game changer to bring it back to its former glory.

On the other hand, light beers may never turn around, and Miller Lite may slide inexorably and inevitably, like an aging beer writer I know intimately, into that great lauter tun in the sky.

The post The Light of My Life is Dimming first appeared on All About Beer.

One of the greatest things about the craft beer renaissance is the almost endless variety of beers that are available in bars, restaurants, supermarkets, and liquor stores around the country. In most forward-thinking establishments, the choices of flavors and brands and styles is dizzying. It is a testament to the ability of the industry to adapt to what beer drinkers want today. It is also—for the industry—a royal pain in the ass.

Within the industry, the explosion of new brands and packages is called “SKU-mageddon.” Here’s why: The beer industry consists of the three-tier system: brewer, distributor and retailer. For all three, it is remarkably simpler and cheaper to brew, package, ship and retail 100 cases of Bud Light 12-pack cans than it is to ship 25 cases of Bud Light 12-packs, 25 cases of Blue Moon 12-packs, 25 cases of Fat Tire 12-packs and 25 cases of Corona 12-packs. That’s a vastly simplified example. Multiply that times 100 and you get my drift.

And the vast acceleration of SKUs is not the only change in the industry. We have gone from an industry of 4,000 distributors and 100 breweries selling 100 million barrels a year to an industry of 1,000 distributors and over 2,500 breweries selling over 200 million barrels (a barrel is the equivalent of two kegs, or 31 gallons). The top five brewers and importers currently sell over 90 percent of industry volume. The remaining 2,500-plus brewers share 10 percent. We have gone from a very limited number of SKUs to over 8,400. Meanwhile, as large grocery chains and big-box centers like Wal-Mart and Costco gain more and more of the nation’s grocery sales, we’re seeing a reduction in the number of independent outlets as well as a reduction in the number of bars.

So to reiterate: Many more breweries, many more brands and packages, selling much more volume of beer, through fewer distributors to fewer but larger retail outlets. Within that structure, we’re seeing more brewers coming out with more packages—craft brewers adding more brewing capacity like crazy as well as an average of one new brewery opening every day—but we’re not seeing the supermarket chains expand refrigerated shelf space at anywhere near the same rate. However, on the bar and restaurant side, we are seeing them add draft tap handles furiously to keep up with (and possibly exceed) the growth in keg varieties offered.

And then you have distribution. Distributors are mostly independently owned businesses that have been consolidating over the last 20 years and continuing to this day. There’s a common perception in the craft beer community that distribution capacity has not kept up with the pace of new craft brewers and brands. However, from where I sit, that simply does not reflect reality. As distributors have grown, they have become more technologically adept at being able to handle the tsunami of new SKUs. In addition, several craft-only niche distributors have popped up in certain markets to take up the slack.

Consider that one of the country’s largest beer distributors, Houston-based Silver Eagle Distributors, handled 400 SKUs five years ago. Today, the company handles over 1,300 SKUs among eight different distribution centers and is adding more every day.

As I mentioned before, one of the major bottlenecks in getting all those delicious brews into the consumers’ hands is the limited refrigerated shelf space in supermarkets and convenience stores. Thanks to Einstein’s law, two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, more’s the pity, so something has to give. And remember, keeping all the beer on the shelf fresh and rotated is an additional challenge.

Some retailers have opted to place slower-moving craft brands on the warm shelf, like red wine. The problem with that is many craft brands are unpasteurized, and storing them in ambient temperatures for any length of time can alter the taste of the beer, and not for the positive.

On the bar and restaurant side, we have the opposite problem. Many establishments have added so many draft taps—20, 50, 100 taps in one establishment is now not uncommon—that it becomes almost impossible to keep the beers that fill those taps fresh. And don’t get me started on keeping the lines clean. And in draft beer, it’s nearly all unpasteurized. Data firm GuestMetrics recently issued a report that while the number of craft beer brands sold in bars and restaurants grew about 22 percent in the first quarter 2013, craft beer volume grew only about 5 percent. In other words, we’re selling less beer per brand, which means less beer flowing per tap. That’s great for diversity and choice, but could be a red flag for beer quality on tap if the volume falls below a threshold.

“While we don’t necessarily see a shake-out in the near term, looking out at the next three to five years, the question will be the sustainability of the economics of a lot of the new entrants given the declining volume per available brand,” writes Bill Pecoriello of GuestMetrics.

It’s not just the explosion of new brewers and brands coming down the pike to watch out for, but also the amount of brewing capacity that is being built. You may have read about Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., New Belgium Brewing Co. and Oskar Blues Brewery building new breweries in Asheville, NC. Or Lagunitas building a new brewery in Chicago. Those are just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of other smaller breweries are a-building and expanding brewing capacity at a furious pace, not to mention the number of new breweries being built and coming online nearly every day.

If you slept through your Economics 101 class in college, here’s the one thing you need to know about excess manufacturing capacity in any industry with high fixed costs (like the beer industry): When demand doesn’t keep up with the building of manufacturing capacity, you end up with oversupply, and prices fall. You may say, “Hey, that’s a good thing.” But in the long term, it means many breweries will start losing money. The result is a flood of bad or old beer showing up in the market. It happened in 1998. Will it happen again? It all depends on whether beer demand keeps up with the fast pace of supply creating.

But hey, let’s not end on a sour note. The facts as they are today suggest that, yes, consumer demand for local, tasty, hand-crafted beer will meet or exceed supply. So far, so good. But the jury is out for 2014 and 2015.

The post Potential Pitfalls of the Craft Beer Revolution first appeared on All About Beer.

I know, it’s not exactly a monster claim. Put down the phone, Matilda, no need to ring up the Guinness World Records people. But it’s something, and I’ll take whatever glory I can get at this point in my career.

To those who have been gunning for this distinction, I regret to report that I’ve had several unfair advantages. My mother, father and grandparents on both sides were soda bottlers and beer distributors, so I started attending both soda bottler and beer distributor conventions while still wet behind the ears. Pepsi convention in Orlando, Schweppes in Vegas, 7-UP (owned by Philip Morris at the time) in Richmond, Lone Star in Houston, Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc in Grand Cayman, S&P (now called Pabst) in Los Angeles, California Cooler in Chicago, etc. etc. Yes, at a Pepsi meeting I met Joan Crawford, and though I was a child, for the record she didn’t beat me with a wire hanger. And yes, at a Lone Star meeting I met Willie Nelson. And got my picture taken with Sonny and Cher, curiously enough.

Upon graduation from college and being cast into the cold cruel world by my wretched parents, I went to work for a Miller beer distributor in Houston, which also sold a myriad of other beers, fizzy waters, teas and juices whose parent companies—all vying for the fleeting attention of their distributor—threw elaborate shows for us to attend. Again I was on the distributor convention road. Then I started Beer Business Daily, which eventually afforded me the invitations of most all brewers and importers to attend their national distributor meetings each year. Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors even took to having two meetings a year. Plus the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s two meetings a year, plus the Craft Brewers Conference, plus SAVOR, plus the GABF, plus the myriad state distributor meetings I attend each year. I wasn’t allowed at first to attend the annual Beer Institute meetings since August Busch III blackballed me. But the late Beer Institute president Jeff Becker would sneak me in. “Don’t worry, pal,” he said with a smile and a wink. “He doesn’t even know what you look like. Just don’t draw attention to yourself.” I sat in the back and never made eye contact with anybody.

Then I started a wine and spirits trade publication and started attending all of their conventions, seminars and confabs as well. Meetings meetings meetings. Sometimes I’d go to the restroom and accidentally board a plane heading to an industry conference. Sometimes I’d kiss my wife, Lulu, on the cheek good night, lay my head on my pillow—and wake up on stage at the Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego.

Pretty soon I achieved Executive Platinum status on American Airlines, which allows me to board the plane before others and sit in the front where there are no chickens, pigs or, most importantly, human babies. And the beer is free. Being from San Antonio—not exactly a hub—I naturally have to fly to Dallas to fly anywhere else. I fly to Dallas so much that sometimes I forget myself and fly to Dallas just to pee and then fly back home. I’m not certain, but I may have a second family in Dallas. I think they live under the bar at the Terminal D Admirals Club, and they might be Vietnamese. If you see them, tell them I love them, and green cards and cash are forthcoming as promised.

The golden age of beer company distributor conferences, I fear, has come and gone. In the old days, the big brewers’ conventions held for their distributors were a spectacle to behold, although the degree of spectacle depended largely on market share. Anheuser-Busch, which had 50 percent of the market, threw the best parties. Lobsters piled up a mile high on ice, free Dove Bars (don’t go well with beer, though), those giant shrimp people call prawns, George Strait playing in one room and Elton John in another, August Busch III arriving dramatically on the putting green self-piloting his jet helicopter; his son August IV arriving much more modestly in a fleet of armored black Suburbans piloted by mercs in the employ of Blackwater, later to ferry him and his entourage late night to clubs. Those were the days.

Miller Brewing Co.’s distributor meetings were only a little less extravagant. I remember one in New Orleans. They recreated Mardi Gras and put us on floats that glided down Bourbon Street as we hurled beads at startled tourists. It wasn’t Mardi Gras, so you can understand their confusion, but that doesn’t stop a big brewery from making it Mardi Gras for its distributors. I recall one feature the floats didn’t have was stopping, as I suspect the driver was deaf, so to disembark we had to leap off in the direction of bushes and tuck into a roll.

Other conventions didn’t go so well. There was the time August Busch IV arrived late to speak at a legislative conference in Washington, DC. He finally took the stage, slurred a few words about partnership and family, gave a nod and a wink to the good senator from Missouri in attendance, dropped his microphone, finally got the hook from his handlers. Cold medicine the culprit there, you see.

Or the time I was verbally attacked in a gondola in Vail at a Beer Institute meeting by several Heineken execs for something I had written. Or the time I was harassed in Aspen at the Caribou Club by every distiller in the room for suggesting that Europeans don’t understand our system of alcohol regulation. Or the time I showed up at a Miller meeting wearing a branded Fat Tire jacket (that’s not so bad. Miller chief Norman Adami actually asked if he could have it, and wore it the rest of the convention). Or when I showed up at an A-B meeting a week early and wondered why nobody recognized me at the hotel bar. One time at a Coors convention in Houston, the tall Pete Coors knocked his head so hard on the door jamb in his hotel room that he emerged the next day with a gash on his head.

Diageo-Guinness USA put me in a Cliff Clavin postal service uniform and allowed me to heckle executives from a makeshift bar on the stage (drinking Guinness the entire time). That was weird, but fun. Yes, I am not above being a monkey on a chain.

And I don’t mind being the scapegoat. I’ve occasionally been harangued at meetings from the stage by brewery executives who perhaps didn’t know I was in the audience—or more likely they did but didn’t care. It’s usually execs at companies whose brands aren’t doing so hot or have a legal conflict going on with one or more of their distributors. It’s a game of blame the messenger. “Don’t believe a word that no good SOB hack Harry Schuhmacher writes about” XYX issue plaguing brewer. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Well, that’s actually probably true. But regardless, I don’t mind playing the villain. It used to bother me, but like most things that don’t matter, I grew out of it. It’s the one benefit of getting older—as you get closer to death, other people’s business issues cease to matter, and the things that used to distress or terrify you suddenly and inexplicably become funny. Besides, playing the straw man for an entire industry is an important and well-paying job. The job was open and I stepped into the breach. As long as they renew their subscriptions, I’ll be Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun and the Wicked Witches (of the East and the West) all rolled into one. Learning to have a rhinoceros hide is important in any career. (There’s a little nugget of wisdom for you young people reading this meandering column. Free of charge. Don’t mention it, really.)

Ten years ago I decided we didn’t have quite enough meetings in the beer industry, because we only had 50 a year and that left two weeks of having nothing to do, twiddling our thumbs. So I started my own beer conference, called the Beer Summit. And we’ve had our share of moments. Most recently, in fact at our Summit last week, Tony Magee of Lagunitas Brewing dropped about five F-Bombs and managed in his 30-minute allotted time to insult almost every other brewer in the room. Very efficient use of time, actually. It was fantastic. Even August IV would be impressed. You gotta love that. Now that August IV is retired, I’m happy to report that we have new characters in the craft beer world to keep the industry entertained for many years to come.

The post Conventional Wisdom first appeared on All About Beer.