Am Too Tired to Be Interesting. Go Read Lew

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After an absurdly long day and a half doing entirely too many things --- none of them meat-related --- am finally catching up on the rest of life. So far, best things I've found are Lew (be sure to read the comments from his readers). . .  and Lew. Chops to Astute Reader Dexter for the Lew-rant about taxes and alcohol. Somehow I'd missed it earlier.

"What Revolution?" The Outtakes, Part 3 of 3

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Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

For your reading pleasure, remnants from the cutting-room floor from an essay I just wrote for All About Beer magazine, titled "What Revolution?" In it, I argue that craft brewing is just one part of the marvel that is the American beer industry. It will likely never become mainstream, but it's as much a part of who we are as the Establishment brewers. For more background to this three-parter, see this entry.

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More to the point, contracting is now standard practice in American business. Consider Amazon.com, which at first glance appears to have nothing to do with brewing --- craft, contract, or otherwise. Amazon is an internet-based company; customers engage with it online rather than in the “bricks-and-mortar” world. Its survival and success depend on reliability: users expect error-free digital transactions; site crashes drive them away.

So Amazon must own and operate enough equipment capacity to handle its largest potential demand load. As with many retailers, that peak demand arrives during, and is limited to, the three days or four days after Thanksgiving, when shoppers descend on the site to buy holiday gifts.

The rest of the year, however, most of Amazon’s processing capacity sits idle, awaiting the next holiday rush. From Amazon’s point of view, unused capacity is unprofitable. What to do? Rent it out to small businesses.

Say Funky Vermont Brewing Company wants to sell t-shirts, caps, and mugs at its website. The brewery is small; the owners can’t afford to invest in the necessary hardware or software. So they rent both from Amazon.

The beer geek who visits the brewery’s website in search of t-shirts and caps doesn’t know, or care, how or where her order is being processed; she only cares that her credit card number is safe and that her mugs and caps arrive on time and in one piece.

Everyone benefits: Amazon uses its otherwise idle capacity; the brewer offers an online shopping experience without investing in costly infrastructure; and the consumer scores the t-shirts and caps that function as walking advertisements for the brewery.

So, too, with contract brewing. Jim Koch made smart choices about where and how to spend his money. But those decisions were less those of a revolutionary than of a brilliant entrepreneur working within an existing framework and focusing on the end  --- high quality beer --- rather than the means.

Yes, Koch, and those who followed his lead (and contract brewers are now legion) tinkered with the details: his lager contained only four ingredients, and his advertising focused on beer rather than babes in bikinis. But he operated within the confines of the Established Order. Instead of ramming the gates, Koch strolled through them and mingled with the enemy.

[Still, many hoped for more, including] Fred Eckhardt, the craft beer advocate who began writing for All About Beer in the early 1980s . . . . In a 1995 essay titled “The Revolution Is Coming” (twenty years in, the revolution was apparently still en route), he complained that the “beast” of Corporate Beer still wandered the land.

“Let me count the lengths they have gone to ruin our beer”: “fruit-flavored, soda-pop-like malt liquor,” “lite beer,” low alcohol beer, “dry beer, light dry beer, ice beer, light ice beer, and color-free beer.”  “But cheers, folks,” he added, “change is a-comin’. The grand Taste Revolution will be here soon . . . .”  (*1)

He did not realize that the Taste Revolution had arrived. Novelty was, and is, the New Normal. The media in general and the internet in particular twisted time and space into a gyrating whirligig that transformed beer “styles” and consumer “audiences” into fragmented niches, and created an infinity of paths between seller and buyer.

Big Brewing enjoys even more outlets for its Big Advertising Bucks, but small brewers, once stymied by mainstream media’s brick walls, now use the internet to advertise their beers, send e-newsletters, and offer visitors virtual brewery tours. Fans of “real” beer congregate at Jonathan Surratt’s marvelous beer-based rss feed, and at websites like beeradvocate.com or basicbrewing.com, and, of course, the one hosted by All About Beer. [Revolution? Does it matter? The beer --- whichever one you want --- is everywhere you want to be.]

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Source: Fred Eckhardt “The Revolution Is Coming,” All About Beer 16, no. 2 (May 1995): 36, 45.

"What Revolution?" The Outtakes, Part 2

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Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

For your reading pleasure, remnants from the cutting-room floor from an essay I just wrote for All About Beer magazine, titled "What Revolution?" In it, I argue that craft brewing is just one part of the marvel that is the American beer industry. It will likely never become mainstream, but it's as much a part of who we are as the Establishment brewers. For more background to this three-parter, see this entry.

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Jackson pinned his hopes for craft brewing’s survival on the Great American Beer Festival (GABF). It was there, he believed, where brewers and consumers met face-to-face, that craft brewing could turn the tide against Big Brewing.

"There is no greater celebration of American beer,” he said --- and no better way to introduce the public to the enormous “variety” of beers that was becoming the hallmark of American brewing.

Variety,” he wrote, “is its own most potent advertisement.” (*1)

If that were true, craft beer, rather than MillerCoorsAnheuserInBev, would dominate today’s market, but Jackson’s other point is worth noting. He argued that the festival’s reputation had grown beyond the Denver area because the “national media” had taken note of the event’s the annual list of prize winners.

The GABF, wrote Jackson, was successful in large part because of its focus on competition and awards. No surprise there. We Americans thrive on competition. We’re the people who turned yoga into a competitive sport. We revel in prizes and medals and ribbons. An entire session of the GABF is devoted to handing out hundreds of awards. Take those away, and what’s left are hordes of (mostly drunk) men and women who love the convenience of one-stop shopping and drinking.

In short, the Great American Beer Festival, which celebrates innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, competition, success, and failure (as measured by awards), is a microcosm of American culture.

Let’s stick with the GABF for a moment. The festival’s focus on awards inadvertently sparked craft brewing’s first major internal conflict: The battle over contract brewing. The episode is worth a closer look because it, too, offers insight into the ways in which craft brewing reflects the contradictions and complexity of American culture.

The conflict over contracting began in 1985 when Jim Koch showed up at the festival. Koch, who had recently launched Sam Adams beer, walked away with a prize that year and the next. His fellow beermakers were not happy. Why? Because Koch did not own or operate his own brewhouse. Instead, he rented brewing equipment (“contracted”) from a small regional brewery.

Koch’s decision to contract stemmed from his understanding of the financial equation before him: He himself had no training as a brewer. He started with limited funds, certainly not enough to buy or build a brewhouse. He knew that successful brewing depended in large part on expertise and quality equipment. So he rented, rather than purchased, the talent and the brew vats, and spent his few dollars on quality ingredients and marketing.

His fellow craft brewers wanted none of it. Contract brewers, fumed one “real” brewer, were just “marketing people” “more interested in making a buck than in actually brewing quality beer.” The whole thing was “dishonest.” (*2) “If I were running [the GABF],” complained the late Bert Grant of Yakima Brewing,

I wouldn’t allow any contract brewers in the thing. You wouldn’t know Sam Adams from Iron City [a Pittsburgh brewing company] except for a little caramel malt.” (*3)

The critics spoke too soon. A few years later, craft brewing was populated by dozens of contract brewers (including the one who had accused contractors of being dishonest).

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Sources: *1. Michael Jackson, “Jackson’s Journal: Beers of America Stand Up and Be Counted,” All About Beer 9, no. 1 (April 1988): 14.

*2: Suzanne Alexander, “Is  A Beer Local If It’s Produced Not So Locally?,” Wall Street Journal, July 21, 1989, B1.

*3: Cottone, Vince, “Beer & Loathing in Denver: The Great American Beer Festival 1986,” American Brewer (Summer 1967): 17.