Yesterday, Boston-based Harpoon announced the purchase of contract brewery Clown Shoes. But this post isn't going to be about the acquisition. Rather, it's about how companies mature and markets sand off rough edges of any company that wants to stay around.
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Base Camp, a brewery I consider new, is somehow celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. For those not up on your anniversary symbolism, let me remind you that five is the "wood" anniversary--Base Camp naturally decided to celebrate with a passel of barrel-aged beers.
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Each year, poly sci professor Jeff Dense runs the economic figures for the Oregon Brewers Festival. They're interesting metrics if you're in the tourism biz, but yesterday, Justin Kendall quoted Dense on a figure I hadn't seen and that is interesting.
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“I was adamantly against it. When I went over to Belgium with a few other brewers two years ago, I was like, we gotta do this, we gotta brew these beers. [But] when I got back I thought: it’s too much work, it’s too risky, it’s too risky having all those microbes in the brewery.”
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In one sense, this isn't entirely surprising. Going to the archives has become a time-honored tradition, particularly in recent history. In an effort to move toward full-flavored beers without acknowledging craft beer, many venerable companies--Guinness, Carlsberg, Coors--have come out with their own throwbacks.
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Local, artisanal ciders are doing very well. There's not a clear definition of "craft cider," but by one measure these cideries were up 40% last year. In key regions like the Pacific Northwest, Upper Midwest, and New England, they have taken root and seem to have emerged as a permanent player.
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This follows the summer launch of a effort to enroll member breweries an independent seal program. "Take Craft Back" is the second prong in the larger campaign. It was a surprising, creative, and frankly aggressive move to engage the fight against "big beer."
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I get it; names are hard. There are 5,000+ breweries in the US alone. Add to that the trademarked beer names and you're getting up there. A lot of the good and obvious ones have either been taken. But come on, breweries of America, we can do better.
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We all know that California won more medals than any other state at the Great American Beer Festival. Pssh. Of course it did!--it's got a million breweries. To really find out how well a state did, you have to know how many entries they had. I've got you covered.
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It's expensive to enter, winning is a crapshoot, and anyway, there are so many medals that a win is likely to get lost in the shuffle. Most consumers don't track these things, and if they learn a brewery has won an award, probably don't care. All of which raises an interesting question. Why bother?
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"So we speak of a beer with a low alcohol content, high bitterness, no residual sugar, so a refreshing beer. It was what we call in Belgium biere de saison, saison beer, brewed in the winter and drunk in the summer."
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The North American Guild of Beer Writers announced their annual awards this morning, and the judges saw fit to acknowledge a few things I wrote last year. It's very special about being honored by your colleagues, so this means a lot.
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Like every brewery of a certain age, Hopworks once-novel IPA started to taste dated once the newer wave arrived a few years ago. In a surprising, fascinating move, Hopworks has reformulated their flagship, a makeover that changes everything (including the label) except the name.
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Not that we needed further evidence, but a recent collaboration between a brewery and a national doughnut chain definitively and conclusively confirm that the term "craft beer" is meaningless.
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It is the third most-brewed beer in the US and yet has no significant best-sellers. It is called "rustic" but is prized for its sophistication. It is the broadest style in the world--if you can even call it a style--and yet most of the tradition traces itself pretty directly back to a single beer.
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