August 31, 2010
Beernews.org’s series of posts called “The Tipping Point” do an excellent job of putting into perspective the growth of the craft beer industry. Playing off of Malcolm Gladwell’s book of the same name, the posts ask what has become a fairly common question these days regarding craft beer:
Despite the great year craft beer is having, there is the inevitably that current trends will come back down to earth. The question is when will that be? Two years? Five years? Ten years?
There seems to be anxiety about craft beer’s success. How long can this last? Have we reach saturation? Will brewers begin to knock each other off as they compete for shelf space in various markets? Gladwell’s thesis, echoed by the series of posts a Beernews.org, is not that we reach a point where there is no turning back; Gladwell’s claim is that at some point, an idea or moment takes off. It becomes an epidemic. It becomes known. In that sense, craft beer is experiencing a tipping point. Gladwell’s first example is Hush Puppies, a forgotten shoe style that gets picked up by New York hipsters and suddenly becomes popular again. “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors,” Gladwell writes, “spread just like viruses do.” When my mother is drinking Bell’s Oberon in a restaurant and my dad is regularly buying Highland, we’ve reached a tipping point. We’ve encountered a cultural virus. We’re infected. The thing is, we don’t mind.
It’s too difficult to pinpoint the entire industry regarding saturation or tipping points. Craft beer is sold in a variety of markets across the country (and nationwide). Even within a state, distribution and sales are not equal. We might look, instead, at smaller scale operations rather than in sweeping gestures of the industry. Which brewers are extending themselves too far, which are going to be big and do well, which will not become big, but will still succeed in select areas? I was surprised, for example, that Nebraska Brewing Company began its distribution by hitting big markets first: New York, Pennsylvania, and Portland, Oregon. Portland, in particular, has plenty of beer with loyal, local followings, is stocked with quality beer on the shelves from across the world, and should be more a competitive market, particularly for the high end $20 750 that NBC sells. Missouri, which is next door to Nebraska, or even Illinois, would seem to be more suitable markets. There is less competition, there is excitement for new beers, and there is not enough regional (or even Missouri) representation on the shelves. Boulevard was recently sending its beers to the West Coast, and I think it has pulled back from many areas outside of Oregon. You can find Schlafly in states outside of Missouri as well, and they send a few offerings to the East Coast. The bulk of their sales, as far as I know, are in St. Louis. Breweries, no doubt, have to find outside markets (with the exception of anomalies like New Glarus whose 90,000 bbls stay in state). North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, and Indiana seem to be popular markets for breweries these days. Of course, markets don’t exist. They are built. With only 5% of the national market (and we’d have to break down local markets for better numbers), craft beer has plenty of markets to build for its products.
Surly, which until recently sold its beer in South Dakota, its home state of Minnesota, and Chicago (draft) is an example of not extending too far. South Dakota is not a “big” market for beer, but likely has plenty of room for growth. Missouri, which has seen a large number of new beers hit the market in the last few years, still has plenty of room for growth. How much growth does Oregon have left for beers not made in Oregon? I’m sure it has room, but if I were sending my beer out of state as a young brewery, I might not think of Oregon first, despite the money currently being made there by brewers.
At Beernews.org we read,
Perhaps the answer is “local.” That same distributor rep also said that one of the things he thought that his really state needed was “better support of local beers.” Would your craft beer-drinking constituency agree?
Local is likely the answer for many breweries. Others, however, like Cigar City and The Bruery have adopted a different strategy: hit the big markets early, gain national exposure quickly, develop a big following. Three Floyds has never ventured too far from Home (Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and once they were in Iowa). New Glarus stays home. Pisgah stays home. One size does not fit all, of course. If we are, though, at a tipping point, we should follow the Gladwell metaphor more closely. We’re experiencing a virus, and hopefully it is one without cure. Bend, Oregon and Asheville, North Carolina, these are small towns with fantastic craft beer exposure. They are infected towns. Columbia, Missouri is still not infected by this virus (but at 100,000 people, it could be). Lexington, Kentucky (230,000 people) doesn’t even know that the virus is out there (even with the wonderful addition of The Beer Trappe, it does not have brewpub representation or local production outside of Louisville’s scene). I’m sure we can find other cities in need of this jes grew styled epidemic. Sneeze a bit. The virus needs to spread more, not less.
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August 30, 2010
Most culinary experiences are explained via travel. Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern’s careers are based on this concept. Through the exotic, the different, the new, the unique, the traveler experiences a gastronomic epiphany or learns something new. Bourdain goes to Russia; Zimmern drinks cow’s blood in Kenya. Sometimes, there is great exaggeration in what is learned; some metaphoric exclamation compares the journey to the discovery of the self, the home, or America. Brian Yeager, Stephen Morris, Ken Wells, and Pete Brown are beer writers who exemplify the travel genre writer. Brown travels the world to recreate a classic beer moment (IPA to India). Yeager searches for the perfect bar.
Lately, I’ve been reading the old, beer travel narratives, old by craft beer history. I’m currently reading Stephen Morris’ The Great Beer Trek (1984). Like the contemporary travel writer, Morris dismisses the mass produced conglomerate in favor of the local producer. 1984 local beer, of course, looks nothing like 2010. Few, if any, of the breweries he mentions will be recognizable today. Morris’ tastes feel quaint today. They feel uninformed. When he gets to Detroit, he praises Stroh as “a clean, inoffensive beer.” Contemporary travelers, like sci-fi characters who time travel, look back on the past with arrogance and hubris. We know better, we want to say. Taste has evolved.
There is physical travel, and there is imaginary travel. While some may call the focus of my passion overrated, the pinnacle of my physical and real travel was the trip to Russian River. I described that trip as a moment of travel. When the imaginary/fantasy (I drink it in Missouri) juxtaposes with the physical (I drink it where it is made), hyperbole and enthusiasm can quickly yield to let down. For me, though, it didn’t. I can paint as hyperbolic picture as the next person can regarding the trip. I can portray the sampler as a metaphoric moment. I can make this a “first time I went to” type of narrative. I can wax on and wax off poetically. 
Such gestures, though, are not the focus of what I want to write. As Maffesoli points to the power of mystery when discussing networks, Vitalism, which drives the desire to network, cannot be represented. I am interested in what cannot be represented by travel. The non-romantic. The non-experience. The imaginary. The fantasy. We photograph our fantasies, what Barthes calls the erotic in place of porn. We do so because we cannot represent what we are feeling.
Comics travel for the sake of a joke. What cannot be represented as reality (Vikings no longer live, nor did they live like this) becomes represented as three or four panels of drawings. With Hagar, we travel back in time while maintaining a foot in the present (otherwise the joke will make no sense).
The imaginary requires us to compare the Viking’s drinking habits with our own. Beer cellars, for instance, mark the point of identification – the way Bourdain eating in a Portuguese village and harping about “this is how it used to be and was supposed to be” marks an identification with the rustic. Michael Jackson and Andy Crouch publish lists of beer in order to elevate our fantasies of drinking: I want that! The informative (the list) becomes the imaginary (as does any top 100 list circulating). Retail follows the trend, adopting the idea of travel into the virtual storefront name, Bottle Trek. You scroll through their lists in order to find what you want to buy. Your consumption travels.
The other aspect of travel is the beer’s travels. Such is the point of Brown’s book. The beer physically travels – from brewery to distributor to me. Or it travels from shop to me, or from a trader’s basement or trip to the store to me. Or I can fall back to the genre of the travel narrative and recount how beer and I have metaphorically traveled: from my father’s Heineken to Moosehead as a late teen to Danish beer while living abroad to Stone while in grad school to Duchess a the Map Room to Bell’s in Michigan, and so on. Such travels never end and they are looked fondly on for our own growth. I’ve matured as a drinker. Travel narratives are built largely on anecdotes. Stories of growth or first times. Mine are built on some other sense of travel. Some other type of movement. Chora over topoi. Drifts over static references.
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August 25, 2010
In Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain’s advice is to order fish on Tuesday, when the fish is fresh, when the cook has rested from his weekend drunk and had Monday off, when everything leftover from Friday has finally been used up in overpriced Sunday brunches and salads. In my house, Tuesday can also be a good day for drinking. As cliches go, Monday is the hard day back to work. Monday is figuring out what to teach for the week, what to plan, wearing slacks for some meeting or other, checking RSS feeds on blogs I haven’t read for a few days. Tuesday is a day to relax before, as the Sports Babe called it, hump day kicks in. Weekdays were made for such trite organizing patterns. I just used the phrase “hump day.” I am ashamed.
Whether I like Mondays or not (don’t tell me), this past Tuesday, I found myself bringing up from the cellar (that’s a fancy word for basement, as my 3 year old’s Fancy Nancy book might say) a Duck Rabbit barley wine. If I were to list the barley wines that move me, that inspire me, that fill me with the sense we call pleasure, that form a pattern of something I call “good,” this one is somewhere near the top, if not at the top, of that list. Of course, every Hair of the Dog beer that is not Blue Dot or Ruth is on that list too. As is Lost Abbey’s Angel Share, Bell’s Third Coast, Upstream’s Batch 1000 and Three Floyd’s Behemoth.
The Moody Blues focused on Tuesday afternoon. Black Tuesday is The Bruery’s contribution to beers people wait in line for. And besides being an “upscale” fast food chain, Ruby Tuesday is the girl who wouldn’t say where she came from. Tuesday Weld was great in Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leone’s tribute to Jewish gangsters in New York. When I lived on Kibbutz Yagur, Tuesday was falafel day. At least that’s the day I want to believe it was, as I make this string of Tuesday associations. Sometimes you have to make the pattern before it makes you. To do so, I just put a bunch of chick peas in water to soak overnight. Tomorrow – falafel!
All of these patterns tell me little about the pleasure I associate with drinking barley wine. Maybe popular culture merely re-enforces the beer’s inherent contradiction (it is is not a wine). Maybe the point is not the barley wine, but Tuesday, the day of the week void of meaningful television to waste an evening with while I drink my barley wine (Monday and Sunday will soon have football; Wednesday is Top Chef; Thursday is the NBC lineup; Friday we finally get around to that Netflix DVD I chose and that my wife always hates).
The question is not what’s the matter with Kansas but what’s the matter with Tuesday? They may call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday – as the song tells us – is just as bad. In the quest to find innovative ways to write about beer and food (outside of the review, the cliche of all online writing; it is a pattern we cannot avoid), I ask about a beer obsession organized by days of the week. Think of the beginning of Happy Days, the hand comes down on the record, it starts to scratch the record, the deep voice of Chuck D rings out: SUNDAY WASN’T NO FUN DAY…..we have six more days to go. This is the Happy Days I invent or I use to organize my TV experiences while I write about barley wine.
I write this, of course, on Wednesday. A day without barley wine. All I had today were a Two Hearted Ale and an Avery Salvation. As Johnny Cash once sang:
Are all bad days and the only try day is Wednesday
And my car was made on Wednesday on Wednesday
If your car wasn’t made on Wednesday I’d advise you not to even leave home any
I feel a pattern develop…..a writing pattern…..maybe Thursday can be a barley wine day too. A Duck Rabbit day.
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August 21, 2010
I’m sitting on a number of beers I call my “big beer challenge.” Either high in ABV, volume, or taste, these are beers I haven’t opened (or had more than one of and opened the others with folks at some point in the past) because they must be shared. The “big” challenge is not the drinking part; it is the sharing part. A 19.3% beer is going to be shared.
Maybe I didn’t learn my lesson from the last big beer tasting we did. Six mostly 10% beers knocked me out for a good couple hours. Don’t call it a come back, though. I never left.
Pictured are a few I pulled from this collection. All wonderful beers. All high in ABV. All waiting to be opened. Maybe I am imagining some Raymond Carver situation; after dinner, the group convenes in the living room. We chat and drink these big beers. Then someone gets belligerent and insults someone else’s wife. “We’re all friends here,” someone else we’ll say. “Sure. We’re swell friends. Real friends.” Or maybe it’s a Bukowski moment; crappy beer substituted for quality beer. And like in Barfly, we’ll find ourselves eating raw corn at some point for no reason. These are the big beer fantasies. They are odd fantasies, but they are mine.
Still, I’m drawn to these big beers, to trading for them, to purchasing them, to stashing them, because with their size comes flavor. Flavor is at the core of all consumption. 2% milk does nothing when you are making ice cream; whole milk is the only option. The HyVee butter is inadequate when baking; Plugra delivers the quality fat. You let some Patric chocolate sit in your mouth for the wine and berry flavor; Hershey you have to swallow without tasting. I don’t eat pork, but you swine folks know what I’m talking about.
The big beer is big flavor. Session lovers are big beer haters. They bemoan the high alcohol, generous doses of coffee and roast, or bourbon aged this and that. A session beer can have flavor, of course, but so few do. Dark Lord has flavor. It has a dangerous amount of flavor. It has so much flavor, it’s the Flavor Flav of beer. Season your food. Use lots of feta and blue cheese in your cheese bread. Roast garlic for salad dressings. Put lamb on your pizza. Bring on the flavor. Bring on these beers.
From recent non-sharing days. All these beers, though, have flavor despite being less than 10%. So I drank them alone:
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August 9, 2010
We got a little carried away.
I would marry Sanctification if I could marry a beer.
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August 8, 2010
Pictures that have somehow become lost in the shuffle. Events pushed their way to the front of the line. These photos were passed over. They are archived in my private space – a computer folder labeled pictures – but not yet in the public space – the blog. In the digital age, it feels important to make your memories public. This is why Facebook works. Lone writers. Lone authors. Lone people. Loners. These are concepts that have gone the way of spaghetti westerns or romantic ideals. We are public people, stretching our fifteen minutes of fame via word counts and pictures.
1. The CBE Tasting on July 25. An idea I had almost two years ago: use membership money to supplement or purchase beer for tasting (and thus drive excitement for new beers). Ideology cannot be bought, but it can be stimulated.
Those that hung around a little longer drank a little longer from my cellar….I, too, am invested in ideological shifts.
2. From a week or so ago…recent acquisitions vs older acquisitions? In this case, the recent won. Hops and flavor motivate my decisions.
3. Odds and ends over the last week or two. This year’s Older Viscosity is very tasty.
Who knew Big Sky produced a Tiple in 750? They won’t send them to Missouri! Thus, finding the bottle in Chicago was my surprise.
I’ve given up on Lindemans. They have ridden the “lambic” tag for too long now without impressing.
Another final Valley Brew. One more to go.
Odonata. From Sacramento Brewing to a new venture. The only good thing about summer is the saison. This one continued my love of the style.
More results from the world of trading, San Diego style.
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August 7, 2010
Before Nebraska Brewing Company, we stopped in Lawrence, Kansas. The air was sweltering, and the temperatures must have been hovering around 110 degrees. Our hotel was a thankful two minute walk to Free State – though the walk from Free State to Sylas and Maddy’s ice cream, a mere four blocks, felt like torture in the heat. I grew up in Miami, I lived in the Middle East, I went to graduate school in the Swamp (Gainesville), but this heat was unbearable.
My first experience with Free State was the two growlers my wife brought back earlier this year. That Old Backus barleywine was among the best I’ve had. I couldn’t convince half the beer nerds in this town to share it with me. Their loss. No barleywine, however, this time.
A fairly standard list for our visit. Next to us sat three tables worth of people. We guessed what brought them together. The one item we fixated upon was the Sears shirt one person wore. “He’s taking them out to dinner,” my wife guessed. One table looked disgruntled. The other chatted away. Someone asked for a daiquiri. In a brewpub. “We don’t have a blender,” the waitress countered.
A generous sampler. All well done. The Oatmeal Stout and Hop Jack were excellent. If we weren’t heading to Nebraska afterward, I would have brought back growlers.
More handles. T-shirts as well. I resisted the temptation to buy yet more t-shirts. In addition to my addiction to buying beer, I have a t-shirt addiction as well. A&E needs to call me. My love of t-shirt’s origins are in Miami flea market purchases of bootlegged rock concert t-shirts. My bar-mitzvah photo has me in a Rolling Stone one. $5. You can’t buy a fake rock concert t-shirt for $5 anymore. Those were the days. We welcomed piracy without any hesitation because it delivered a $5 shirt. For all I know, $5 shirts still exist; its the flea market that is extinct.
The scene from across the room. A small brewpub that looks like a Spanish or Mexican restaurant. And once again, the kind of quality and variety – for this size establishment – I wish we had at home is found on the road. Great Dane. Nebraska Brewing Company. Free State. Brugge. Laurelwood. Let’s bring that quality back home.
My daughter, her face flush with the effect of the heat. A dorm hall worth of college kids filtered in as well. They looked less impressed with the heat than us Southerns. Each one paid for a $2 cone with a debit card.
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August 6, 2010
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August 6, 2010
Midwest beer. We are familiar with various names: Bell’s, Founders, Three Floyds, Schlafly. Boulevard. As we name these beers, as we use them as spatial place markers for experience, the Nebraska beers are slowly making their presence felt as well. Upstream. Lucky Bucket. Among these other names is Nebraska Brewing Company. Sitting in a big box store shopping center (like 5 Seasons in Atlanta) in the deep suburbs of Omaha (no doubt, far from Warren Buffet), NBC is making some fine beer. My brother in law and I drove down to sit at the bar. As is my taste, we arrived before noon. I like arriving before noon, before serious lunch goers show up and long before the happy hour crowd makes sitting at the bar impossible. I like quiet drinking. I like everyone to be gone, but that the establishment still make good money. I am a man of contradictions. If it were up to me, Dark Lord Day would be ten of us sitting in the brewery. No lines for the restroom. Guest taps as we like them. Plenty of talking and discussing of all things beer related.
At NBC, we were greeted with spicy potato chips served like Belgian fries and a nice talk with the owner.
The handles. As my good friend often asks, “What kind of handles they got?”
The bar and restaurant are surrounded by tanks. The 10 barrel system is pushing beer to Oregon, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania, but not to Missouri. I asked why not send the beer closer to home? Apparently, Missouri Beverage didn’t return the owner’s calls. MoBev is missing out on a big time account. I was insistent that Missouri should be the next market, now that capacity is at its limits, of course.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see this brewery pick up attention the way Cigar City, Pisgah, or The Bruery have. Small operations that produce excellent beer become known through social networking, trades, and word of mouth – as Fritz Maytag said long before the Internet. Beer nerds love to talk. They talk and talk about what they like. They talk about what they don’t like. Most of all, they make sure others know what they like. Ratings help this process as well. Blogs do little but review. We are a chatty, obsessed group.
One of the joys of beer hunting is talking. At Omaha’s Beertopia store, the guy behind the counter was eager to talk beer. So was I. I am right now as well. I’m always ready to talk beer.
The beer that is helping to spread the word. I bought four. I had when it was the Chardonnay, so I am ready to talk already.
The Pale and IPA. Both excellent. I will tell you this without doing a lame review: they were tasty.
Hop God. I had enjoyed it in bottle previously. No bottles left to be bought now. Draught will suffice. It will suffice, I say!
Summertime Rye. Well balanced. Very tasty. On the way back to Lincoln, we stopped off at The Still, and I picked up bottles of Fat Head (barley wine) and Black Betty (stout). The guys behind the counter told us what the brewery’s owner had already told us: he had been in a few days earlier buying up his own beer as well (it’s the first batch, and there are few bottles left, even for him). I will talk about what I purchased here shortly….as soon as I drink them.
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July 31, 2010
Belmont Station is not just a bottle shop. It is a beer heaven. Beyond the bottles – if I had been shipping beer, I could have dropped $300 easily – there were 14 taps of beers none of us had tasted before (except two). Visiting a place like Belmont makes me angrier than ever at airlines and their idiotic $25 each way baggage fee. At $50 just to pack a suitcase, the price of bringing back beer becomes too high. One is forced to carry on and, thus, not bring back beer.
The wall of tap handles of beer past…
Hopworks. The final stop. We got off at the bus stop, missed the transfer bus, and walked the rest of the way.
The place spelled “youth.” We are old. Nevertheless, we briefly enjoyed ourselves before turning back for dinner. At this point, we were beyond burgers and fries; we could see the crowded tables around us fill up with typical appetizers (chicken fingers) and meals (sandwiches) for a brewpub. I snapped a picture of the chalkboard on the way out. One last chalkboard. Its details felt comforting. Style. ABV. A real list, in the literacy sense of the word. I should redo these five posts as such a breakdown. I should re-imagine the trip not as photos with brief sentences describing some of them, but as a chalkboard list (something akin to Levi’s The Periodic Table). For every ABV, I should have a story. For every style, I should share a related anecdote. In that way, I might make better sense of the vacation. The broventure. In that way, the network of meaning that we call experience might be foregrounded better.
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