When a Brewery Loses its Way, Ommegang Edition
Brewery Ommegang turned 25 this year, which is an important and impressive milestone for any business. For the first fifteen, it was considered one the country’s best breweries, setting a standard for the heights classic Belgian-style ales could achieve. The first time I visited the GABF in 2011, Ommegang impressed me more than any other brewery there that year. Longtime brewer Phil Leinhart’s ales offered a master class in subtlety amid strength, harmony, and just plain tastiness. It was a brewery at the top of its game.
Americans started drifting away from Belgian beers in the early teens, about the time Ommegang landed that Game of Thrones deal with an eye toward turning a large audience onto their elegant creations. But hops were ascendant, and things started slowing down by the middle part of the decade. At the same time, a metastasizing market of new breweries pushed Ommegang’s regular offerings off shelves and out of taprooms, and its remote location in Cooperstown meant people in Syracuse and Albany—never mind NYC—no longer considered it “local.” These two trends were worrying, but while volume started to drift downward, it wasn’t yet a crisis.
I visited in 2018, as they were dabbling in the first of their non-Belgian hoppy beers (Neon Rainbows), a step that would lead to a half-reinvention of the brewery as an IPA house. They put those beers in cans, but still sold bottles of the regular, old-school line. Ommegang would soon let Leinhart and President Doug Campbell go, double down on the IPAs with what to my eye is a cringey OMG line of hazy IPAs and pastry beers, and limp forward with one foot in the past and one in the future.
We can argue about these brand choices, which have many precedents in brewing. (You may not agree with the decision, but it was hardly the first time a brewery chased trends in the market.) But one thing I never expected was a decline in quality. I haven’t loved most of the OMG beers the brewery sends, but they’re well-made. They lack the clarity and mastery of the core Belgian-style beers they’ve been making for decades, but they’re on par with the beers many breweries are making. When I’ve had the core line, it seems up to past standards.
But—to finally get to the point of this post—then they sent a bottle of Everything Nice, a spiced Belgian-style blonde ale that should be 100% in their wheelhouse, and I’m reconsidering everything. It isn’t just bad, it’s bad in the most surprising way: it tastes like a Belgian-style ale brewed by a brewery that’s never made Belgian-style ales.
The trouble starts with the nose. A hot plume of alcohol sends a massive dose of spices streaming out of the glass (it’s 9% ABV). The flavor is worse—it’s just way over-spiced. The brewery lists cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and white pepper as ingredients, but they form a wall of sharp astringency. I could distinguish the cinnamon, but the other spices blend into a mass of over-extracted bitterness. It makes the alcohol seem harsh, and the booze and spice bitterness clash. It was actively unpleasant and I couldn’t drink more than a few sips.
Spices are hard to work with, but Ommegang has tons of experience with them. One of Leinhart’s skills was using them as almost-invisible accents. I don’t know how this happened—and worse, I don’t know how Everything Nice left the brewery. The base beer, to the extent I could taste it, seemed fine. The brewery could have blended it down with a second batch—halving the spice might not have been enough, but it would have helped! Failing that, they should have just dumped it.
A number of reasons might cause a brewery to send out bad beer, but none of them are good: they don’t realize it’s bad, they need the money, or, as I suspect here, they have to send a seasonal order to distributors and have no time to make another batch. But whatever the reason, Ommegang has gotten to the place where they think sending out a subpar beer (to be generous) is better than dumping it. It’s a klaxon that all is not well.
This is one of the dangers of going through a major brand shift, especially for older breweries. Those first SKUs may sell well, but they come at the expense of the core line. I was generally in favor of adding the IPA, Neon Rainbows, when it came out. Ommegang had an eclectic line, and tucking in one IPA for the hopheads made sense. But there was no way Ommegang was going to make a successful transition to an IPA brewery the way New Belgium did. It was too radical a change in direction. One of the downstream dangers can be serving too many masters, which is what seems to have happened with Everything Nice.
I don’t have anywhere near enough information to guess how Ommegang will turn out. As a part of the Duvel collective, it may be protected longer than an independent would be. But breweries like Ommegang—older, legacy breweries casting about for an identity that fits the times—will find this period in craft brewing difficult. I’m old enough to remember the last period like this, beginning in the late 1990s, and a lot of breweries didn’t make it. It is the way of things, melancholy as that reality is.