IN LATE 2005, Sam Calagione, the founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Delaware, traveled to New York City to participate in an odd but instructive competition: He and a sommelier served their respective specialties during a five-course dinner, a different wine and beer with each course. Calagione brought along Fort, a fruit-based ale concocted from more than a ton of Oregon and Delaware raspberries and with an alcohol content of 18 percent. He also poured Pangea, only 7 percent alcohol but flavored with an ingredient from every continent (including ginger and basmati rice); India Brown Ale (7.2 percent), with its notes of coffee, ginger, and chocolate; Raison d’Extra (18.5 percent), brewed from brown sugar and raisins; and World Wide Stout (18+ percent alcohol), a desert beer that the brewer compared to port. Calagione left behind at the brewery his Chateau Jiahu, a concoction brewed from honey, grapes, hawthorn fruit, and chrysanthemum flowers; his Immort Ale, made from peat-smoked barley, organic juniper, and maple syrup, and aged in oak casks; and his Burton Baton, an oak-aged ale with hints of citrus and vanilla. At the end of the evening, the guests voted on which they preferred with each course—beer or wine. Calagione won three of the five courses (and might have won a fourth had his staff not inadvertently packed the wrong beer for one of the courses).
On the other side of the country, the folks at Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa, California, age their Temptation in oak wine barrels for a year. Supplication also sits in oak barrels—Pinot Noir casks, to be precise—for a year before the brewmaster declares it ready. Little White Lie, a wheat beer, contains coriander, cumin, and orange peel. None of those sound good? Then try some of the brewery’s other offerings: Pliny the Elder, Dr. Zues, or Parking Violation. Deification, Beatification, or Sanctification. Redemption, Perdition, or Damnation. Erudition, Salvation, or Rejection.
And back on the East Coast, Jim Koch, still sitting comfortably in the ranks of brewing’s top ten, reigns as current king of what he calls “extreme beers.” The 2003 vintage of his Utopias rippled with the flavors of vanilla, oak, and citrus and possessed an alcohol content of 25.6 percent, high enough to land it a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Too much, you say? Try a bottle of Samuel Adams Millennium, with a (somewhat) lower alcohol content and hints of cinnamon, butterscotch, and pear. Or for something a tad more mundane (relatively), how about a bottle of Koch’s seasonal Cranberry Lambic?
Welcome to American brewing in the twenty-first century, where anything goes; where brewmasters are not just pushing the boundaries of beer, but redefining this ancient beverage. Where, in 2005, fifty breweries and brewpubs went under, but forty-nine new ones appeared to take their place. It is this kind of creativity that has defined the industry for decades. Like beer itself, the business of brewing seems a living creature—often buffeted by forces beyond its control, but constantly adapting, changing, shifting shapes and direction in order to survive. How many industries can claim to have been reinvented not by government bodies or huge corporations, but by individuals? How many industries can claim an entry bar so flexible that a guy with welding skills and a few thousand bucks can shake it up and fashion something new?
And therein lies the mystery, the wonder, and the excitement of American brewing and its history: At its core are passionate men and women. In that sense, today’s industry—some fifteen hundred breweries and brewpubs, ranging from giant Anheuser-Busch making 100 million barrels a year to individually owned brewpubs dispensing a few thousand barrels a year at bars located fifty feet from the brewvats—has not changed much from its inception in the 1840s, except that there are more fine beers and a greater variety of them than at any time in American history.
At present, craft beers command less than 5 percent of the beer market. That’s not much, and it probably explains why the number of breweries and brewpubs has remained flat over the past decade: There are only so many consumer dollars that can be siphoned away from Anheuser-Busch, a behemoth that is determined to grow, not shrink, its own already gargantuan market share.
Per capita consumption of beer has continued its downward slide, and while A-B continues to post gains, the few remaining mainstream brewers are fighting a losing battle to stay in the game. Most analysts think Pabst Brewing, to name one battered example, is terminally ill, a claim that’s easy to believe given how hard it is to find Pabst Blue Ribbon in an ordinary grocery store.
To a certain extent, Big Beer has only itself to blame for its sagging fortune: It keeps playing the same old song, over and over and over. Remember the Anheuser-Busch ads during the 2005 Super Bowl? A snowy scene, an old-fashioned sleigh, two lovers snuggling—and the Clydesdales passing gas. Or the company’s anti-Miller ads in which A-B touted its beers as “American,” in contrast to foreign-owned Miller? (When Coors merged with Canadian Molson, A-B immediately did the same to the Colorado brewery.) Miller retaliated with, among other things, TV commercials that featured taste tests in which bar patrons are shocked—shocked!—to discover they’ve chosen Miller Lite over Bud Light, or Miller Genuine Draft over Budweiser. Set advertising like that next to the beers being made by Koch and Calagione, and the ads seem not just stodgy, but hopelessly out of synch with today’s consumers.
Still, there’s no denying that American beer drinkers today live in a barley-based paradise. How long will this current golden age last? Impossible to say. Already there are corporate-owned chain brewpubs that serve mediocre beers. But that was true back in the nineteenth century as well, when more than one brewer served up indifferent beer simply because he could find an equally indifferent saloon to carry it. More troubling to beermakers of all stripes are the wines and spirits gnawing at their share of the alcoholic drink market.
On the other hand, craft brewers continue to do what they’ve done, and done well, for a quarter of a century—treat beer as a sophisticated, sensual, flavorful delight—and so their small market grows each year, even as beer consumption slides. Perhaps that explains a move on the part of Anheuser-Busch in early 2006, when the company suggested that brewers join forces to improve beer’s image. The idea was to borrow a tactic employed in recent years by producers of milk, eggs, and pork: Mount an industry-based campaign that would tout the virtues of beer, regardless of brand. In this case, the ads would focus on the art and craft of brewing and suggest ways to pair beer with food. As an Anheuser-Busch spokesman put it, “Craft beers have pushed hard on selling the romance of the product, but we [mainstream brewers] have not,” choosing instead to dump money into TV spots centered on babes, sports, or “brown bottles in icy water.” It’s an idea long overdue, but only time will tell if any of A-B’s competitors will join in the project (as of this writing, May 2006, none had).
Of one thing I am certain: the heart of brewing will always be its people. In the course of writing this book, I met some of the most intelligent, passionate, and energetic people that I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. They gravitate toward brewing, I think, in part because beer is itself an exciting, lively creature capable of almost infinite complexity and nuance. So I am optimistic: American beer will continue to attract the brightest and the best, and those people will, in turn, continue to reinvent the beer and the industry. Indeed, perhaps American beer’s best days are yet to come.
Prosit!