Craft Madness

In an effort to continue the ongoing parallel between beer and sports, as though that parallel needed my help to sustain, I am writing today about beer brackets. In other words, this newly over-hyped and sensationalized notion that you can take a bracket, similar to the one used in the NCAA basketball March Madness tournament, populate it with beer instead of college teams, and pit these beers against each other in a seeded, single-elimination, winner-take-all, popularity contest.

Rick Grimes asked you nicely to vote for The Walking Dead

These days, in a world where nobody has any good ideas anymore, but rather recycles good ideas that already exist, and where social media has made it impossible to a) keep a good idea novel and b) avoid the cancerous over-propagation of “played-out” former good ideas to death, March Madness-style brackets exist for literally everything. Yesterday, I was given a link to a “television shows” bracket that pitted The Walking Dead against Sons of Anarchy and Dr. Who against Once Upon A Time, I’m assuming with the intent to determine which show is best, as if determining that sort of thing was possible by collecting votes for one show over another. I've also seen brackets for books, star wars characters, and not surprisingly, beer.

Newspapers, or more accurately news websites, in an effort to remain relevant in this ever changing and hostile to traditional media outlets world of ours, are usually at the center of these bracket challenges. In the case of the beer brackets, there are more of these available every year, always coinciding with the NCAA basketball tournament, and this year, it seems as though every news outlet in existence, from local to national, has a beer tournament.

Truth be told, I don’t mind the local ones. Craft beer is still an emerging industry that posts gains every year in market share, and the beer itself is increasing in popularity as well. At the local level, there is a lot of pride to be found between brewers and the local population, and by extension, ratings to be had by the local media playing off of that pride. Local beer brackets also tend to encompass a good swath of the local product, scooping up multiple offerings of like style from each of the local breweries and giving a good indicator of which is best, or at least, which is the most liked or most popular.

They want you to believe this is the formula for populating
beer brackets, but it's a little less sophisticated than this

When you get to the national news outlets and the macro-crafty beer brackets, things tend to get a bit preposterous. First of all, there are 2,416 breweries in the United States as of March 2013 - 2,360 of which are craft breweries. Typically, a March Madness bracket consists of 32 or 64 spots, so advanced mathematics tells us that a newsroom flunky or blogger (I hate them) that is tasked with building a national beer bracket is going to have to do some trimming. Conventional wisdom says that, in order to appeal to national readers, you have to select beers that people all over the country have heard of or they won’t care. So now you have a bracket filled with Sierra Nevada, Dogfish Head, New Belgium, and most likely (because these aren't beer people creating these things and they don’t know any better) crafty big beers like Shock Top, Blue Moon, and Goose Island. Of course, if AB/InBev/SAB/Miller/Coors is a major sponsor of the newspaper/website, they may even insist on throwing in some Budweiser Black Cap or Redd’s Apple Ale, or some other disgusting shame of a beer.

My point is, it’s impossible for properly made, delicious brews without the mass distribution and add campaigns to get any consideration for these macro-tournaments. They might be good enough for the unenlightened plebes, but those who take pride in what they are drinking and want to be part of something more know better, and deserve better.

So what is the solution? How can a national, all-encompassing, beer bracket be made better?

Pay attention flunkies

This is for the newsroom flunkies and sponsored bloggers who I know are reading my tireless drivel. The only way I see that you can make this work is to fully embrace the NCAA model. The NCAA tournament isn't randomly populated right before the madness starts by teams everyone has heard of. It is cobbled together with teams who won their conference, or are nationally ranked, or have a good RPI (Ratings Percentage Index – quantity that ranks teams based on wins/losses and strength of schedule). The way you do this is to partner with the local papers and affiliate TV stations and let each region decide who it’s best beers are, and then divide the brackets into regions.  Don’t worry about like styles (which is a common concern in beer brackets) because since winners are determined by popular vote in these things, it is a popularity contest and comparing apples to bananas won’t matter.

My advice for those of us who are consumers (or not affiliated to beer brackets, but rather the target demographic of said brackets) is to ignore the national ones. They are quite literally watered down to the lowest common denominator, to the point of being a colossal waste of time. The local ones, on the other hand, can be fun, and particularly if they are done well, can be a good way to socially enjoy craft beer. If you’re a brewer, and for some reason you’re reading this blog, please take the March Madness beer brackets away from the media people. Bless their hearts, nobody tries harder, but they need our help. My vision, if anyone cares to know it, is that the local breweries get together and build a 64 beer bracket with their local brews. Use the local media to market the idea and spread the word, and then let the people judge in a flight-based, beer tasting event that is hosted at the breweries (or a neutral site), while watching March Madness basketball on TV. Depending on how many breweries are in the local market, you can rotate which brewery hosts the tasting per round of the tournament. Tally the votes. Winner takes all. Great for PR, and great for local pride (and thirsty beer drinkers too).

Shoo... I wouldn't miss the semis...

BTW – For those of you who are in the DC metro area and are following the Washington Post’s 2013 Beer Madness tournament, my Final Four consists of Wild Wolf Brewing Company’s Local Wolf India Pale Lager from Nellysford, VA, DC Brau’s The Citizen Belgian-style IPA from Washington DC, Starr Hill Brewing Company’s Northern Lights IPA from Crozette, VA, and Dominion Brewing Company’s Oak Barrel Stout from Dover, DE. In the semis, I have The Citizen beating Local Wolf and Northern Lights beating Oak Barrel Stout. In the finals, it is Starr Hill’s Northern Lights edging out DC Brau’s The Citizen. Then again, it’s just a popularity contest, so what do I know?

Here’s to craft-brewed happiness… Cheers!