Portfolio.com: First Draft

Defending Your Beer

Fri, 02 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT

As prices go up on almost everything you eat and drink, it makes sense to try to get things fresh and keep them that way. Check "best-by" dates; eyeball the produce. Put dairy in the fridge, meat in the meat drawer, and tomatoes on the counter. Soft drinks seem bulletproof, while wine has to be kept cool and out of sunlight. Everyone 21 and older knows this stuff.

Nobody seems to know what to do with beer, however—including a lot of the people who sell it. I see too many six-packs of bottles sitting in glass-front coolers lit by fluorescent tubes. Light is death to beer.

I learned about that and other ways in which beer can go bad by doing a series of experiments on some freshly bottled beer from a local brewery. I put it in bright sunshine. I froze it. I slow-roasted it in the oven. I subjected it to eight cycles of chilling and warming. I felt bad mistreating beer like that, but those beers suffered so other beers could be better. Here's what I found.

Keep your beer in the dark
The beers that sat in the sun got real whiffy; the technical term is light struck, but most of us call it "skunked." (In skunkless Britain, it's called "cat's piss.") Dave Radzanowski, former president of the Siebel Institute, America’s oldest brewing school, explained that part of the chemical makeup of hop oil is light sensitive. When light of a particular wavelength hits it, "there's a photosynthetic reaction which changes that grouping to that of the common 'skunk' aroma." Sunlight and fluorescent light are especially harmful; incandescent light is less potent.

I had my bottles in the sun for more than eight hours—overkill. "If you have a beer in clear glass exposed to direct sunlight, it can go skunky in five to 10 seconds," Radzanowski said. Brown glass offers some protection, but clear or green offers a marginal amount. Some brewers use hop extracts that are immune to light—Miller included—and some beers with a low hops content can get away with clear bottles. But to be safe, buy beer that hasn't been sitting in the light, and keep it in the dark. Cans, of course, keep out all the light.
Don't worry about warming
This is probably the question I get most often. "I bought this beer cold, and then it got warm. Is it still good?" Yes! I'm not sure how this myth started, but it takes many cycles of chilling and warming to have an effect on beer. My program of eight cycles didn't change the beer's taste compared with the cold control bottle. That being said, beer will stay fresh longer in the refrigerator than on a room-temperature shelf. But unless you're chilling and warming your beer every day for a month, just drink it and relax.

Avoid extremes (sometimes)
If you have a choice between sticking your beer in the oven or the freezer, go with the icebox. Of course, most people do neither—but they might leave it in the garage or the trunk of a car.

Extreme heat damages the proteins in beer, giving you a bunch of floaty bits, and can cause nasty aromas to develop: "Like a can of creamed corn, with a scary whiff of gutter stink" is how I describe the smell of my roasted beer.

Freezing a beer, on the other hand, can work out nicely, if the bottle doesn't leak or crack as it hardens. The first keg I ever bought was a half-barrel of Genesee Cream Ale that had frozen solid. We let it thaw slowly, and I still remember it as the best Genny Cream I've ever had: smooth, with a velvety mouthfeel. Freezing also depletes proteins, though not as abruptly or completely as heat does, leaving the beer tasting smoother, if nothing goes wrong. But use this theory with care, or you may have a malty mess in the freezer.

Drink your beer fresh…mostly
Best-by and "born-on" dates are great advantages for the consumer. You can tell if the beer is fresh, and you can get an idea of how fast the store is turning over its stock. But beer isn't milk: It's not harmful or smelly past the best-by date; it just won't taste quite as good. Anheuser-Busch's born-on date is the date of packaging. The company claims that the beer is good for 110 days after that date. If it's not sold by then—something that doesn't happen often—A.B. will pull it off the shelf.

Not all beer is best fresh, though. Like some wines, some beers get better as they age. It's not an exact science, but beers that are more than 7 percent alcohol, not overly hoppy, and bottle conditioned (bottled with yeast) are the most likely candidates for aging. I've had beers more than 20 years old that were fantastic: They are drier than the younger versions and often develop sherried notes that can add depth and complexity to a big beer. Keep them as you would wine—in a cool, dark place with no changes in temperature—but unless the beers are corked, store them vertically.

Now, all I need is someone to tell me the best way to keep coffee beans fresh. Then I'll be set for drinks—morning, noon, and night.
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Sweet Wheat

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:00:00 GMT

When I was a boy, my father and I used to hike across the Amish farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. One day we were walking by a wheat field, and my father caught hold of a head of wheat and pulled it off the stalk. He rubbed it between his hands and let the chaff blow away; a profound, ageless moment. "Have some," he said, offering the brown, plump grains to me. I'll never forget the taste: dry and dusty at first, then suddenly nutty, sweet—and tangy.

These days, I don't just eat wheat, I drink it in the many varieties of wheat beer. I'm not the only one—American beer drinkers are waking up to wheat. Molson Coors' Blue Moon Belgian White Ale, a spiced wheat beer, headed the annual list of strong-growth beer brands released last month by retail-analysis firm Information Resources. It's a trend that hasn't been missed by other brewers: Anheuser-Busch and Miller have both launched wheat beers, the latter as part of its new Miller Lite specialty series.

Wheat beers are good all year round but seem best in warmer months. The attractive characteristics that wheat adds to beer—tanginess, a smoother mouthfeel, fluffy foam—make wheat beers great refreshers and easy drinkers. (They also make tasty marinades for chicken or pork; try pouring a bottle of witbier and a squeeze of lemon over chicken for good grilling.)

Wheat, unlike the rice or corn used in mainstream lagers, is one non-barley malt ingredient—an "adjunct," in brewing parlance—that is historically acceptable to craft brewers and beer geeks. Wheat beers are often the first crossover craft beer for mainstream beer drinkers. The reasons aren't all in the kernel, but that's where they start.

When I chewed those wheat kernels, what happened in my mouth is exactly what happens when malt gets cooked, or "mashed," at a brewery. The enzymes in my mouth broke the starches in the wheat into sugars, just as enzymes break down the starches in the mash. If you're stirring the mash, you can feel that happen. One moment you're forcing your way through lumpy oatmeal, and the next, the paddle is slipping through a syrupy soup.

When the enzymes work on malted barley, though, you get only sweetness—none of the tanginess you get from wheat. "Even though the pH of wheat beer comes out about the same as all-malt beer," said Ron Barchet, brewmaster at Victory Brewing in Downingtown, Pennsylvania (not far from where my father and I hiked), "there's an acid release during the mash that carries through to the beer and gives that flavor."

Barchet mentioned that most beers traditionally made with wheat—hefeweizen, Berliner Weisse, witbier, Kölsch—have relatively high carbonation, which can give a perception of a light acidity as well. That was when I started to realize that it's not only the wheat which makes the difference, it's what the brewer does with it—producing a great wheat beer means designing it to make the most of what wheat has to offer.

Consider the classic styles of wheat beers: They are often cloudy—the haze comes from the greater protein content in wheat (or from yeast left in unfiltered German wheat beers). The proteins make the long-lasting foam; bubble walls are protein constructs. Wheat beers are generally lighter in taste, which makes them an ideal blank canvas for fruit beers, or the coriander-curaçao orange-peel kick in witbiers like Hoegaarden and Blue Moon.

The cloudiness, foam, lightness, and tang all come together in American wheat beers like Widmer Hefeweizen, which lures mainstream drinkers with its intriguing look and rewards them with a refreshing, approachable drink that has a hint of something different. The look—cloudy with a fluffy head—is why Portland-based Widmer Brothers Brewing was able to stay draft-only for years before going to bottles.

Hefeweizen is the generic term that Germans apply to their unfiltered wheat beers; it means, literally, "yeast-wheat." Widmer's beer is unfiltered, but the yeast in a German hefeweizen is completely different, a happy mutation that whistles a wild array of aromas while it works—banana, clove, smoke, plum, and vanilla, a delicious match with cheese and fruit. They are popular morning beers in Germany, served in a tall, curvaceous glass tube, a Wonderbra for beer that pushes the wheat head up and out of the top.

These styles work best with wheat. I've had hefeweizen, American "wheat" beer, and witbier made without wheat as experiments, and they were clearly inferior—like turkey burgers. Conversely, I once had an all-wheat malt India Pale Ale, or IPA. It was difficult to brew—the extra protein in the wheat makes for a very sticky mash, the reason most wheat beers are no more than 60 percent wheat—and for no payoff. It tasted like a crisp, hoppy IPA, maybe on the lower side on body.

While I'm all for innovative brewing, knowing when to stop is important too. We know what works with wheat: So brew it, pour it in our glasses, and don't try to improve on perfection. Spring and the season of bock beers will soon draw to a close. Bring on summer's heat and a tall, cloudy glass of cool wheat beer.Related Links
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Breaking News

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

On April 7, when most American brewers were celebrating the 75th anniversary of the legalization of beer after Prohibition, Boston Beer Company had to turn off its taps.

Inspections at the company’s Cincinnati brewery revealed small bits of glass inside some of its bottles, and Boston Beer issued a voluntary recall of an array of 12-ounce beers.

“It was discovered in a pre-filling quality-control process called candling,” said Boston Beer spokesperson Michelle Sullivan. “You fill the first 100 bottles of a new lot of glass with water, and then look at them in front of a big light box.” The first bottles showed small flakes of glass in the bottom, “almost like grains of sand,” said Sullivan.

Beer recalls are pretty rare, and this is the first in Boston Beer’s history. But things like this have happened. Last November, Harpoon Brewery, which is also based in Boston, recalled its limited-edition 100-Barrel Series Pêche, because some bottles were breaking under the pressure of the twice-fermented beer. The Delaware-based Dogfish Head Brewery once had to recall some corked bottles that had a tendency to shatter.

The problem was bigger for Boston Beer, which had an estimated volume of more than 47 million gallons last year. It quickly did checks at all five of its contract plants and turned up the same bottle defects. The lot, embossed on the bottom rim with the code N35 O-I, came from the Auburn, New York, plant of Boston Beer’s single glass supplier, Owens-Illinois. “It’s a defect in the bottles, not our bottling lines,” said Sullivan, adding that Owens-Illinois had confirmed that statement.

All of Boston Beer’s bottles come from Owens-Illinois, and about 25 percent of that from the Auburn plant. “Significantly less than 1 percent of those bottles had defects,” Sullivan said. “But of course, the standard is zero percent.” Owens-Illinois supplies glass to other craft brewers as well, but there have been no other reports of defects.

The best strategy in any industry recall is to get the word out quickly and completely, take responsibility for the problem, and offer a solution. After a day, Boston Beer has two parts of that well in hand. Wholesalers and retailers knew within hours, in part because Boston Beer sent emails to major beer-enthusiast websites. Boston Beer’s stock dipped yesterday afternoon following news of the recall but recovered by this morning, presumably because of the company’s fast response.

But retailers were concerned about responsibility. Dennis Jenkins, owner of Centre Beer in Newtown, Pennsylvania, said he had 60 cases of Samuel Adams beer. All but the cases of Cherry Wheat had at least some bottles with the N35 O-I code. “I’m not selling any Samuel Adams beer until I get solid information on what’s going on,” he said. “If I do, and something happens to the customer, where do I stand?”

The third step in the recovery strategy—a solution—is more complicated. Boston Beer is having wholesalers and retailers pull the beer from shelves and urging consumers to dispose of the defective bottles. It’s issuing full refunds on potentially affected products.

Still, the root cause of the defect is unknown, and Owens-Illinois has not yet released a statement. There have been glass-bottle shortages in Europe and the U.S. during the past year, stemming from high energy costs and demand from Asia. But Sullivan dismissed the idea that Boston Beer may have had to source bottles from other suppliers. “This was not a problem of supply,” she said.
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Best of the Fest

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Gird your loins, drinkers: It’s beer-festival season. From now until late October is the busiest time of the year for these taste extravaganzas, where you can sample a wide variety of beers from brewers large and small.

My first beer festival was about 15 years ago at the Stoudt’s Brewing Company in Adamstown, Pennsylvania. About 20 microbrewers were there. For a $20 ticket, you could sample as many beers as you thought you could handle. There was live music from the Daisy Jug Band and a buffet of wursts, kraut, breads, and potato salad. Brewers poured their own beers: You could ask them about their brewing methods and what made their beer different. Maybe you’d even get some of the “secret" beer they kept under the table. I was hooked. I wanted to go to one every weekend.

With some variation, that’s how most fests go. You can probably find a local one (try the Beer Festival calendar or BeerAdvocate’s calendar). Some offer a free samples; others require you to buy tickets or tokens, but all of them have plenty of different beers to try.

Hit the fest like a pro with these proven tactics: Try lighter beers first; save the dark, high-alcohol, and seriously hoppy beers for later. (You don’t want to blow out your taste buds.) Drink plenty of water to cleanse your palate and your head. Remember to eat; big beers on an empty stomach is a fast ticket to Drunksville. Always know where the bathrooms are. Get a copy of the festival program, and make notes or marks by the beers you like most (you may want to find them again). Most importantly, pace yourself so you can enjoy the whole event.

Ready to take it on the road? Here are six of the best beer festivals in North America:

Mondial de la Bière (May 28 to June 1)
The Mondial (which, as you might expect, is in Montreal) is not just about beer but also about food, cider, and mead (a beer-strength drink made with fermented honey). Beer is still king, though, and you’ll find many Canadian breweries which you’ve likely never heard of. The Mondial emphasizes connoisseurship—learning about what you’re enjoying at seminars and guided tastings. Best of all, it takes place over five days with free admission, so you’ll have plenty of time to try the more than 350 beers (and all the cheese).

Oregon Brewers Festival (July 24 to 27)
The O.B.F. is held in Portland, home to 30-odd breweries and brewpubs, more than in any other U.S. city. This multiday fest takes place on green, grassy fields along the lovely Willamette River. The idea is to experience new breweries, so more than 70 brewers, from Oregon and elsewhere, each bring one beer. Some offer their best-known beer, while others showcase special releases. If you run out of time, several great brewpubs are within walking distance. Admission is free; you only pay for the beer you drink and your souvenir mug.

Belgium Comes to Cooperstown (August 1 to 3)
B.C.T.C. is a small event, with only 800 tickets available. But the experience is fantastic: more than 150 Belgian and Belgian-style beers, including those of the host, Brewery Ommegang, all situated in wooded farmland near Cooperstown, New York, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Add in the music, camping, starlight, some wild brewer behavior, and you’ve got the Woodstock of brewing, without the brown acid.

Great Taste of the Midwest (August 9)
It’s neither the biggest nor the oldest festival, but it may be the hardest ticket to get. The Great Taste is held in a pretty lakeside setting in Madison, Wisconsin, with 600 beers from 100 brewers—and only 5,000 tickets. The home brewers who sponsor the festival will release 3,000 tickets locally on May 4; there will be a mail-order lottery for the other 2,000. Oh, but it’s worth it! Great beer, great brats, and, of course, great Wisconsin cheese.

World Beer Festival (October 4)
At World Beer, All About Beer magazine gathers together not just craft brewers from around the country but also importers who bring beers from around the world. On the first Saturday in October, they all arrive at the historic ballpark in Durham, North Carolina, where Bull Durham was filmed. There are specialty presentations of aged beers, cask-conditioned beers, and rare and expensive beers. It doesn’t hurt that Durham sits smack-dab in the middle of some of the best barbecue country in the South.

Great American Beer Festival (October 9 to 11)
The G.A.B.F., which takes place in Denver, boasts more breweries and beers than any other fest in the world. Last year, 408 breweries, from Anheuser-Busch to the smallest brewpubs, poured 1,884 different beers for 46,000 attendees during the course of three days. You only get one-ounce pours, but you won’t taste everything: One ounce of every beer on offer would be 117 pints! The G.A.B.F. awards medals in a dizzying list of categories (86 this year), and when the winners are announced on Saturday afternoon, it’s a rush to the annointed taps. Buy tickets beforehand, or pay scalpers’ premiums on the sidewalk.

And, finally, the first Philly Beer Week (I’m one of the organizers) was a big success last month. Watch for this week of 200-plus beer events—festivals, dinners, tastings, pub crawls—again next spring.
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A Tale of Two Cities

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 04:00:00 GMT

As beer recaptures its former glory, beer tourism has become an emerging phenomenon. People want to taste beers in their natural habitat. They want to see the breweries, drink in the beer halls, and eat the local food. I was at a lambic-beer festival in Belgium recently, and the tents were full of Americans, Britons, and Italians.

I had arrived in Belgium from Germany, a place that should be high on your beer pilgrimage list. Germany is flooded with beer tourists every year during Oktoberfest, an event that typifies Germany’s attraction to the traveling beer lover, with plenty of pilsner, pork, and polkas. Germany is Lagerland, where the cold-fermented, cold-aged quaff is king.

I went to two cities on the northern Rhine River that have stubbornly different beer traditions: Düsseldorf and Cologne. In Düsseldorf, the local breweries make altbier, a dry, slightly roasty dark amber ale. Cologne has its own city beer, kölsch, a light-bodied straw-gold ale that’s crisp and refreshing.

These aren’t quaint local choices, surviving only on the patronage of German beer geeks; they dominate the local markets. It is actually hard to find a pilsner in either place—which is like being unable to find a burger in a U.S. city the size of Detroit.

I had traveled for the true altbier and kölsch experience. In Düsseldorf, I wandered the Altstadt neighborhood, dubbed “the longest bar in the world” in a nod to the 300-odd drinking establishments stuffed into its half-square-kilometer. There is the hausbrauerei (a house brewery—what we would call a brewpub), the Spanish tapas bar, a dive bar favored by crews off the Rhine barges, and fine dining establishments. Every one of them serves one brand or another of altbier, and at most of them, that’s the only beer they have.

In Cologne, which is a 25-minute train ride from Düsseldorf—you arrive at the main train station by the huge cathedral—you find the same situation with kölsch. You can start at Früh am Dom with a hearty breakfast and a couple glasses of kölsch, then stroll down to the Heumarkt plaza and hit a whole string of kölsch houses for a quick glass in each.

And they will be quick: Kölsch is served in small, plain, cylindrical glasses that hold just under seven ounces. Your waiter will keep bringing them for as long as you keep drinking them, making a mark on your coaster each time; when you’re done, you put the coaster on top of the glass and he’ll add up the marks.

Things work the same way in Düsseldorf, except that the glasses hold about two swallows more. I’m usually more of a “try this one, try that one” kind of drinker—but with beer this good, I’m with the locals: Keep ’em coming, and bring me some of that good Rhenish wurst too.

The reason that these beers still hold sway is historical, as Horst Dornbusch describes in his book Altbier. Early Bavarian beer regulations prohibited brewing in the summer, when warmer weather often resulted in soured beer. Brewing in the winter led, naturally, to the evolution of yeast that worked better in colder temperatures. This is what we now call lager yeast.

But brewers in Düsseldorf and Cologne continued to brew in their cooler summers, and the yeast of choice remained the warm-temperature ale variety. Add the determined independence of these two wealthy trading cities—and their traditional rivalry—and you have the reasons that their local brewers didn’t go to lagering. There are other cities in northern Germany that still have indigenous ales: Berlin, with its strikingly tart Berliner weisse and the yeasty, spicy Leipzig gose. But they are not dominant like the beautifully drinkable altbier and kölsch.

I’m happy to say that prospects for the future of these two beers are good. Despite the consolidation that has shaken the German brewing industry, the local markets remain devoted to their city beers. The most serious problem facing the smaller altbier and kölsch makers is one that confronts urban brewers everywhere: There is no room for expansion.

In the Altstadt, I talked to Zum Schlüssel (To the Key) brewmaster Dirk Rouenhoff, who showed me where the brewery had been forced to grow onto the roof and into cellars. “We have nowhere else to go,” he said. The building is classified as historical, “so we cannot change it that much.” A quarter of the brewery’s 15,300-barrel annual production—about the same as that of a healthy American microbrewery—is sold in bottles. Rouenhoff has to send it to an off-site bottling facility because he has no space for a bottling line. It’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem.

Each beer type currently represents about 3 percent of the overall German beer market, and almost all of it is sold in or near the two cities. Don’t expect to find any crossover. The folks in Düsseldorf make it very clear that they don’t care for kölsch or Cologne: “You know, kölsch isn’t very good, and their glasses are too small,” I was told more than once in the Altstadt. People in Cologne ignore the existence of altbier and Düsseldorf altogether, offering a lofty indifference when the subject is raised.

When I’m in Cologne, I drink kölsch, and I’m very happy, whether it’s the fresh and grainy glass at the modern Paffen, at the northern end of the Heumarkt, or the malty, more old-style brew at Malzmühle, across the tortuous intersection at the southern end. When I’m in Düsseldorf, I’ll drink Rouenhoff’s fine altbier in its airy home or settle into the more warrenlike environs of Zum Uerige for glass after glass of its classically dry rendering.

It’s a pleasant step out of the pilsner mainstream, in either case, but, really, both city’s glasses are too small for beer this good.Related Links
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Slammed Sam

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Last month, the maker of Samuel Adams put 10 tons of hops up for sale to its craft-brewing competitors at cost—last year's much lower cost—adding only a nominal shipping fee. This took place in a hop market so tight that the Boston Beer Co. had to postpone brewing one of its one-off beers, a double I.P.A., because the hops it required weren't available at any price.

Selling the hops was a highly confident move for a company that had seen its stock drop 30 percent in one day only three months before. But Boston Beer has a good reason to be confident; it knows how to focus on the long term.

"The hops we use are very expensive and therefore have limited customers," explains founder and chairman Jim Koch. "We have to contract years in advance. You can't just show up and buy them. If you don't brew with a hop strain, if you don't buy it, they won't grow it. The way the market works now is how we've always worked." Boston Beer has similar contracts for malt and has developed proprietary malts with its suppliers.

The company is also changing how it brews in at least one important way: It's getting out of contract brewing. For most of its 24-year history, Boston Beer has relied on contract brewing, the practice of hiring breweries with excess capacity to make beer. Contract brewing brings some distinct advantages: Capital costs are much lower, labor negotiations are someone else's problem, and you can always go elsewhere. Contract brewing allowed Koch to focus spending on product development and marketing, a large part of why Samuel Adams is the biggest-selling craft beer in the U.S.

But contract brewing also has its problems: You're not first priority for production, the gross profit is lower, and you have to overcome an image problem when your "micro" beer comes from a large brewery. In Boston Beer's case, the challenge was even greater because the large breweries weren't in Boston, but the company has been mostly successful in getting past the issue.
Then there's the most critical point, which only arises as sales rise to Boston Beer's current levels—volume figures for 2007 aren't yet available, but the company should be over 1.5 million barrels (more than 47 million gallons). Finding a brewery with that much spare capacity becomes difficult, the ones that have it start to see you as a real competitor, and you can't piece together your production from too many different places without affecting the consistency of your product.

In late 2007, after inconclusive negotiations over a site for a new brewery in Massachusetts, the company announced that it would purchase a Diageo facility in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Boston Beer planned to pay $55 million for the brewery, which could potentially sustain its production needs for the next ten to 15 years. The shift in strategy bumped Boston Beer's stock to a record high of $55.30 on November 6.

Then the company issued its third-quarter statement. Boston Beer, it said, would be spending between $60 million and $100 million on additional capital improvements to the new facility. The company also expected a 10 to 14 percent increase in production costs (for hops, malt, and glass) and intended to continue investing in its brands at "high levels." Boston Beer also reported a 46 percent decline in quarterly profit because of increased production costs. The stock hit a low of $31.25 about two weeks later and is currently trading at around $36.

Profit statements like that are hard to face. But Koch strongly believes that the Lehigh Valley purchase is the right move. It will bring virtually all of Boston Beer's production in-house, he says. The additional capital investment is "more than just lunch money," he says, but the brewery needs improvements—an automated kegging line, for instance—and repairs to basics like the roof and brickwork.

Still, the bones of the place are solid. This was where Pabst Brewing made the beer that won most of its large number of Great American Beer Festival medals, and there were years when this brewery won more of them than any other. Koch noted that the facility was designed to make old-school lagers, brewed to full strength and aged in traditional horizontal tanks for longer periods of time. "It's well suited to the beers we want to make there," he says. Boston Beer even had some brews made there in the late 1990s; Koch hopes to be back in the facility by June or July.

Put it all together and Boston Beer looks pretty good. The craft-beer segment is growing steadily, and the company has costs under better control than most domestic competitors, while imported specialty beers are taking a beating from the weak dollar. Price increases—which should be less than its competitors'—in 2008 will partially offset the rising costs.

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Beer on a Truly Micro Scope

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 05:00:00 GMT

The name says it all: One Guy Brewing.

It’s a statement of fact and of ownership. Walk into the tasting room and you’ll probably see the titular one guy behind the bar: Guy Hagner, brewer, bartender, cook, janitor, everything. This is the ultimate in “micro” breweries.

One Guy is not that micro in terms of floor space. The brewery takes up two large, echoing bays in a former commercial bread bakery, just off the main street in Berwick, Pennsylvania. Berwick, an upstate town of about 10,000, is the home of Cheez Doodles, a PPL Corp. nuclear power plant, and a high-school football team—the Bulldogs—with a statewide reputation. It’s definitely not typical craft-beer territory, what with its largely blue-collar, aging, rural population.

But One Guy is the kind of brewery that’s filling in the craft beer map. The fastest-growing chunk of the industry last year was what the Brewers Association still refers to as microbreweries: not brewpubs, but packaging brewers who make fewer than 15,000 barrels a year, the smallest of the small.

When microbrewing started, back in the 1970s, all the operations were small: a couple of brewers, a mongrel collection of equipment, and cheap (or free) space in garages and empty factories. The microbreweries grew, and became “craft” breweries when it was obvious that they weren’t all that micro anymore. The beers they created established strongholds in cities such as San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Portland (both Oregon and Maine) and spread from there. Around 1994, the growth attracted entrepreneurs who saw the numbers but didn’t understand the business. Over the next three years, market crowding and bad beer led a number of breweries to close. (Read “Capital Punishment.”)

Guy Hagner’s Franconia Brewing, in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, was one of them. Its traditional German beers were excellent, but there wasn’t enough money to get their message out through the market noise. Franconia closed in 1999 after less than a year, and Hagner and his wife declared personal bankruptcy, with more than $1 million in debt. “We were at the end of our ropes, maxed out,” he recalls. “We still haven’t recovered. That changed me, aged me. I’m less optimistic, more cynical.”

One-man brewing offered a way to get back into brewing without the massive debt. Hagner put One Guy together—with a lot of barter and shrewd eBay shopping—for less than $80,000, a figure too low to have been possible for someone without his connections and experience.

One-man brewing offers independence too. Brian Hunt’s been doing it since 1992 with Moonlight Brewing, in Fulton, California. Not having to answer to anyone but his customers lets Hunt follow his muse and create beers like Sublimmminal (yes, that is the correct spelling ) Fresh Hop, a deliciously balanced beer made with fresh hops in every part of the brewing except the kettle, where hops are normally added.

“You can’t do the same things other breweries do,” says Hunt of the very small brewer. “You can’t make Bud, but you can’t make Sierra Nevada Pale Ale either. You have to find something you can do better, and focus on that with your passion and skill.”

Scott Smith has built a solid following for the beer he’s making on his own at East End Brewing in Pittsburgh by promoting directly to drinkers. He delivers kegs—sometimes by bicycle—he does promotions, he fills growlers at the brewery: When you get East End, you get the brewer and the owner.

That’s part of the appeal of these small operations. People may discover a brand like Blue Moon, or Samuel Adams, or New Belgium and embrace it because it’s different, it’s small, and not as many people know about it as they would a mass-market label. But for some, that’s not enough. They want a truly different, truly small beer that next to no one knows about. Savvy retailers want those beers to draw that kind of crowd, the kind that is willing to pay a bit more for a beer they can’t get elsewhere.

Oddly, for these tiny operations, success can seem like a threat: If your beer sells well enough, pressure mounts to expand. Hunt’s brewery is “bursting at the seams,” though so far he’s been able to find ways to make it work. Adding another person represents a large increase in spending and accounting overhead, and small brewers hold off as long as possible.

The pricing threats faced by the industry, which I covered in a November column, “A Harvest of Higher Prices,” have hit the small brewers as well. The problem is less severe, however, because they’re able to make microscopic buys in the lowest tier of the market. Hunt compares it to being in a rowboat when the large brewers steering the Titanic spot an iceberg. “It’s cold in the rowboat, but there’s a big difference in flexibility,” he points out.

One Guy is using that flexibility and independence to try something that doesn’t rely on hops. Hagner has brewed up something he calls Cinnamon Boldy, a lager with honey and Vietnamese cassia cinnamon. It actually drinks a lot better than it sounds—a warming, aromatic beer with a hot, sweet center that’s been doing well in initial sales. Bigger brewers with big budgets may have better equipment, but they don’t have a corner on imagination. A small brewery—a tiny brewery—may be where today’s cutting edge is being honed.
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A Case Against Deregulation

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 05:00:00 GMT

If you don’t live in Pennsylvania, this is going to sound a little weird: When I go to the beer store (a state oddity), I have to buy at least a case of beer.

It’s not because of my terrible thirst; it’s the law. We call it the case law, and it’s been in place for more than 70 years, since shortly after the repeal of Prohibition. You can’t go to the store and buy six-packs, 12-packs, or single bottles.

We can buy six-packs at licensed premises, like bars and restaurants—if they offer the service. Not all of them do, although some people buy a bar license and sell only six-packs, an interesting end run around the law. But there’s a catch there too. You can’t buy more than two six-packs at a time—though if you step out the door, you can step back in and buy two more.

Pennsylvania’s case law is uniquely convoluted, but much of the rest of the United States suffers under similarly irrational beer laws. Mississippi has a 6 percent cap on alcohol levels in beer, even though the state allows sales of 18 percent fortified wine. Utah doesn’t allow private citizens to buy kegs; apparently, they’re considered Weapons of Mass Drunkenness. A number of states have separate licenses and stores for beer with 3.2 percent alcohol by weight and for “high-alcohol” beer.

Relief is in sight: Stupid beer laws have been falling. Florida did away with its beer-bottle law, which restricted the sale of beer in anything other than 8-, 12-, 16-, or 32-ounce bottles and cans, in 2001—although the sale of beer in bottles larger than 32 ounces is still not allowed. Montgomery, Alabama, now allows the sale of draft beer rather than just beer in cans and bottles. South Carolina recently “popped the cap” and now allows beer with more than 6 percent alcohol by volume, though the upper limit is now 17.5 percent. Dry towns across the South are reconsidering their booze bans to draw restaurant business.

In Pennsylvania, there’s a bill in the state House that would allow six-pack sales at beer stores and allow bars to sell up to three six-packs. It’s considered a pretty safe bet for passage—Pennsylvania voters have said in polls that they want to see the end of the case law. The state’s small brewers are all for it; it makes their more expensive beers easier to sample. Even Mothers Against Drunk Driving is in favor of the change, because it lets people buy beer in smaller quantities.

Great, right? It’s great for consumers, maybe, but highly disruptive for the tavern and beer-store owners. The case law has shaped their business—down to the fact that beer stores have concrete floors and wide aisles for moving pallets of cases around, and they lack nice shelves and glass-front coolers and display units. The guys who laid out big money for bar licenses to sell six packs—they can run as high as $500,000—may wind up expensive curiosities. As one store owner told me, “I’ve got to change my whole store to accommodate this.”

Montgomery bars are spending big bucks on keg coolers and draft lines and learning about line maintenance and cleaning glassware. South Carolina stores need a lot more shelf space for the hundreds of new beers that are now legal, and the state’s craft brewers are scrambling to learn how to brew big beers to compete with out-of-state double IPA’s and barley wines. Restaurants in formerly dry towns have to compete with chain restaurants drawn by the new opportunity.

It’s easy to brush this off as part of doing business, as a lot of beer bloggers are doing. The tavern owners in Pennsylvania have had a 72-year monopoly on six-pack sales, and we’re supposed to feel sorry for them? Beer-store owners had the luxury of never having to open up a case and stack sixers in the cooler. Hey, get to work!

That’s cold, almost a bit Stalinesque. Some of those businesspeople worked hard within the system to bring Pennsylvania a variety of beer that is second to none. The six-pack-shop guys went deep in pocket for a more expensive bar license so they could sell us the single bottles we craved. The laws were ridiculous, and I’m glad to see them disappearing. But these guys were our beer comrades, they fought the revolution with us, and now we’re going to send them into exile, saying essentially, work harder or starve.

I’d feel worse, but I suspect they’re going to land on their feet. They were, after all, the men and women who were beating the hell out of the system already. The beer-store owner I talked to was one of them. “I’ll have to put in shelves, and I maybe won’t be able to carry as many beers,” he said. “But I’ll do it.”

Faced with consumer demand and a change in the law, what else would you do? Beer is a highly regulated product, and changes in those regulations are part of the risk of business. Looking at the accelerated pace of regulatory change affecting alcoholic-beverage sales over the past 15 years—increased taxes, labeling and advertising guidelines, keg registration, and stiffer D.U.I. laws—it’s only going to get riskier.

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You Can Can Craft Beer

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Two scenes. First, 30 years ago, I’m on a tour of Anheuser-Busch’s Williamsburg, Virginia, brewery when something went haywire on a huge canning line. In the few seconds it took a worker to hit the big red

STOP

button, more than 50 cans of Bud had been sliced open, spraying beer all over the floor. Canning was high-tech, high-speed, and very much big brewery.

Second scene, five years ago, at the Oskar Blues Cajun Grille and Brewery in Lyons, Colorado, brewery owner Dale Katechis lined up two cans and filled them manually with Dale’s Pale Ale, a full-fledged hop-snorter of a beer. He sealed them and, after filling four more, pulled plastic six-pack rings down on them. It was the beginning of what Katechis calls the “Canned Beer Apocalypse,” a name that was a reflection of how funny the whole thing seemed.

Putting craft beer in cans was just not something you did. Light beer belonged in cans, and frat boys crushed the empties against their heads. Craft beer belonged in glass bottles—which were better for the beer in some vague, mysterious way.

Like other things the craft-beer business put forth as dogma—blending batches is cheating, pasteurization of beer is always bad, a bit of variation in your beer proves that it’s handcrafted—that was more a case of making a virtue out of necessity. Canning equipment was wicked expensive and massive, with more capacity than craft brewers needed. Used bottling lines could be gotten cheap from all the small soft-drink bottlers that were going out of business. A few craft brewers had their beers canned at other breweries, but it was sporadic, and the product was aimed mostly at boaters, sports arenas, and airlines.

European brewers had been putting their craft-type beers in cans for years. Czech pilsners come in cans, you can pop the top on a can of Belgian witbier, and Guinness Stout was a pioneer with its funny little plastic widget inside the can for creating the famous Guinness “cascade.” There’s even a Belgian sour ale that comes in a can. But in America, there was a stigma to the can that just wasn’t going away.

Then in 2001, along came a Canadian company, Cask Brewing Systems, that had developed a two-head manual can filler. Cask Brewing cut a deal with Ball Corporation to make relatively small lots of cans—a 150,000-can minimum, about a semitrailer load, instead of the million-can runs that were the standard. Katechis received their brochure and laughed—his craft beer in a can!—and then stopped to think about it.

That pause was providential. Cans put Oskar Blues on the map. Originally a sideline, something for brewpub customers to take home, the unexpected popularity of the cans—coupled with the brewery’s excellent beer—has led to growth of 2,000 percent since that first fill in November 2002. They’re moving into a new, much larger brewery building this spring.

Katechis has become something of a can evangelist, and has encouraged other craft brewers to pack their beer in metal. Today the folks at Cask Brewing count more than 30 breweries that use their equipment, and the varieties that they can is tremendous. I just bought four cases of beer for a long weekend upstate—all cans, from three different breweries: I.P.A. from New England Brewing in Connecticut, pilsner and pale ale from Sly Fox in Pennsylvania, and Old Chub Scottish ale from Oskar Blues.

It just makes sense. The can is a superior package to the bottle. Cans are lighter and take up less space, making them cheaper to transport and store. They’re more durable once filled. Cans are completely lightproof, meaning the beer won’t get “skunked,” acquiring the nasty odor that comes from hops compounds breaking down in sunlight. Cans today come with a lining that keeps beer away from the aluminum, eliminating the metallic taste that used to affect canned beer. They seal up with very little air in the can, keeping the beer fresh longer. They’re even cheaper to recycle. Any “but it’s a can” stigma evaporates with the first taste of the emphatically nonmainstream taste.

It’s not clear if it’s a spreading trend, or just a package that works well for new niche players in the market. The established players in craft brewing are too big to make the switch to cans on a whim. They’re looking for a solid record before they purchase the expensive high-speed canners they’d need to accommodate their big supply pipeline—proof that canned beer is not just a gimmick. Smaller brewers without a bottling line can jump right to Cask’s low-cost canning setup, which is what you’re seeing for now.

Beer drinkers have taken to canned craft brews—cans sell as fast as brewers can fill them, and the doubters have faded away on the beer-geek discussion websites—but there’s not a lot of popping the top and guzzling from the can going on. “How many people buy a Belgian tripel and drink it from the bottle?” Katechis challenged. He advocates pouring the beer from the can into a glass.

That’s okay, but when I’m out “recreating” with a couple of cases of Sly Fox pilsner cans in the cooler, I don’t see any reason not to pop one open and enjoy it right from the can. Maybe it’s not at 100 percent full beer-geek enjoyment, but it’s quick, it feels normal, and it tastes good.

Katechis is right about one thing, though: “It’s kind of fun that you can smash one on your forehead when you’re done.” Light beer or not, boys will be boys.
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Half a Market Waiting

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 05:00:00 GMT

January is a time for new directions, resolutions, and change. Along those lines, I’ve got a suggestion for brewers: Make 2008 the year you discover women.

Beer marketing reeks of testosterone. The staples include sports, cowboys, rappers—male rappers—big powerful animals, physical labor, and frat-boy humor. When women appear, they’re either carrying a tray of beers or standing around looking beautiful. Miller Lite’s “Catfight” ad of a few years ago took things to over-the-top heights when two models, arguing about the beer’s tagline (“Tastes great, less filling”) ripped each other’s clothes off and mud-wrestled.

That ad stirred criticism for its blatant sexism (I actually found it puckishly self-referential), but it was much more notable for showing women being clearly interested in beer. Women make up a not-insignificant 25 percent of the beer market; they are supposedly the reason beer comes in six-packs rather than eight-packs—a sixer was presumed to be as much weight as a woman would feel comfortable carrying in one hand—and are often credited (or blamed) for the success of light beer. Yet judging by the world portrayed in advertising, brewers think that women don’t like beer, and brewers large and small continue to largely ignore the female demographic in their marketing plans.

There’s some evidence that this impression may be changing. A recent article on Miller Brewing’s Brew Blog noted six trends in the beer market; “feminization” was No. 5. “Marketing should be inclusive of women,” the writer advised. “And there is an obvious corollary, which at times has been forgotten in the beer business: Advertising shouldn’t be offensive to women.”

When I talked to Anheuser-Busch about the female side of the market, it gave a pretty P.R.-perfunctory response. “Women love beer for many of the same reasons men do,” said Keith Levy, the brewery’s vice president for brand management. The company offers a variety of products for women, he says: “Whether it’s a light beer, a low-calorie beer, a refreshing beer to savor, or those that have a hint of fruit or sweetness, women have several brands to choose from within the A-B portfolio.”

They’re talking the talk, but where’s the walk? Sure, women can choose from among the beers already out there. But “If you build it, they will come,” works only with ball fields and dead athletes; beer’s got to be pitched. Miller at least sounds as though it understands the theory: You have to include women in your marketing plan, not just be aware that some of them might like products you already have.

Craft brewers have been less sexist in their advertising—maybe because they haven’t had much money for advertising to begin with—but still, very little of their marketing has been geared toward women. Instead, their ads center on the beer itself, which is great, but craft brewing is largely a man’s world (about 1 percent of craft brewers are women) and the message the ads project reflects that: These are big manly beers, not beers for sissies.

So here are some New Year’s solutions for brewers large or small who want to break into a market that’s thirsty for attention.

1. Hire a woman to market your beer to women. Enough said.

2. Clean up your act. You don’t go out of your way to offend ethnic groups or gays, so why make ads that belittle women? Make ones you’d be proud to show to your daughter.

3. Play up beer’s positive aspects. Beer is low in alcohol. Beer is consistent from year to year. Beer is all-natural. Beer comes fresh from the tap or in inexpensive single-serving bottles. Beer tastes great.

4. Talk about food. It worked for wine; it can work for beer. Anheuser-Busch has been doing a lot of work in this area and has a beautiful new cookbook out called Great Food, Great Beer. Some nice glassware will help too: New Belgium Brewing has created the Worthy Glass program, selling and giving away glasses specially designed to enhance the beer drinker’s experience.

Selling beer to women is a great idea. Half the market is being undersold.
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