Brewper Bowl III (Pre-Game Report)

Live from bitterly cold Northern Virginia

Welcome to the 2014 edition of the annual mash tun double feature known as the Brewper Bowl. As the title may have given away (depending on your Roman Numerals skills), this is the third time we've done this, and those of you who have been reading this nonsense for a while can attest to the unbelievable ups and devastating downs that this clash of craft beers has produced in years passed. For those who are new, here is a quick over view of how it works.

MVB of Brewper Bowl I

The concept couldn't be simpler. I take an undetermined number of craft beers from one of the two cities represented in the Super Bowl and pit them against the same number of craft beers from the other city in a head to head contest to determine which of the two cities has the best craft beer. The number is deliberately undetermined mostly due to availability of beers from certain markets here in my home town. Availability has also forced me to expand the aperture of where the beers come from, so that I can include beers from the city and surrounding area when choosing combatants. As for the logistics of the ordeal, I basically go to my local specialty beer store, package store or grocery store and fill my flight with whatever is at my disposal.

As I mentioned in the opening, and again, as the title indicates, this year’s Brewper Bowl is the third time we've done this. As a history lesson, in Super Bowl I, Boston, Massachusetts defeated New York City, New York on the strength of a solid performance by Sam Adams Latitude 48 IPA. In Brewper Bowl II, San Francisco, California suffered a gut-wrenching defeat in overtime to Baltimore, Maryland in a game that saw two successful onside kick attempts, and a beer get a perfect 10 out of 10 score!!! If you’d like to relive the magic of years passed, for the first time or as a review, here are some links:

·        Brewper Bowl I pre-game

·        Brewper Bowl I post-game

·        Brewper Bowl II pre-game

·        Brewper Bowl II post-game

But enough history and back story. It’s time to get serious. The stage is set for Brewper Bowl III, but before we can get underway, let meet the opponents.

* Note – The below descriptions were copied from the brewery websites and are the intellectual property of those responsible for writing them

Colorado sure loves its craft beer

We’ll start with the brews from Colorado, otherwise known as #TeamManning:

1.   Hoppy Boy IPA – Twisted Pine Brewing Company, Boulder, Colorado – 5.7% ABV, 60 IBUs - Hoppy Boy India Pale Ale is Twisted Pine Brewing Company’s flagship beer. With a rocky ivory head, star-bright golden orange color, and massive hop aroma, Hoppy Boy is the quintessential American IPA. Citrus, resin, and a hint of malt not only greet your nose, but also your taste buds, while a smooth, lingering bitterness leaves your palate refreshed with every sip. Hoppy Boy IPA is a perfect marriage of malts and hops that is as bold as it is balanced, and thus exemplifies what American craft beer is all about.

2.   Deviant Dales IPA – Oskar Blues Brewery, Longmont, Colorado - 8% ABV, 85 IBUs - Deviant Dale’s IPA was born at the crossroads, in a juke joint, as if Dale’s Pale Ale sold its soul to balance Deviant’s foreboding aromas of citrus, grapefruit rind and piney resins, its copper ball-of-fire color and inscrutable flavor-intense finish. Deviant is the Devil incarnate with untold amounts of malt and hedonistic Columbus dry-hopping. Oskar Blues delivers this boundary-buster in the brewery’s first 16-ounce tallboy can.

3.   471 Small Batch Double IPA – Breckenridge Brewery, Denver, Colorado - 9.2% ABV, 70 IBUs - Hoppy? Brother, 471 IPA redefines hoppy. 471 is a small batch, limited edition ale that was created by our Brewmaster to separate the weak from the strong. 471 is a double IPA that combines Pale, Munich, Caramel-30, Carapils and Torrified Wheat malts, with Chinook, Centennial, Simcoe and Fuggles hops. It has a big sweet mouthfeel, followed by more hoppiness than you've ever had at one time. Enjoy.

Sounds like a great plan to me

Now, let’s meet the brews from Washington, who have elected to be called #TeamSherman:

1.   10² Highly-Hopped Barley Wine Ale – Fish Brewing Company Reel Ales, Olympia, Washington – 10% ABV, 100 IBUs - The Mighty Fish Brewers first produced 10² Barley Wine Ale to celebrate Fish Brewing Company's tenth anniversary. The ale was so good and the response to it so overwhelmingly positive that it has become the crown jewel of our new RELEASES line. Ten different hops - Horizon, Chinook, Columbus, Willamette, Tradition, Northern Brewer, Santiam, Tettmanger, Cascade and Golding, in the order of their use - give Ten Squared a unique hop character which has to be tasted to be believed. Even with 100 IBUs, this brew sports a strong malt backbone. Two-row Pale, Caramel 40, Caramel 75, Special B and Aromatic malts impart remarkable balance for such a hop monster. This is smooth ale with surprising similarities to ten year old malt whiskey. Produced for the Holidays 10² Highly-Hopped Barley Wine Ale is usually available into late spring.

2.   Hodgson’s Bitter End IPA – Fish Brewing Company Fish Tale Ales, Olympia, Washington – 6.5% ABV, 70 IBUs - Pours a dark golden-yellow color. Hodgson's is an aggressively hopped IPA with beautiful aromas of citrus & pine. The taste is very hoppy, spicy & full of the bitterness cherished by hop heads.

3.   Porter – Scuttlebutt Brewing Company, Everett, Washington – 5.8% ABV, 20 IBUs – Porter is full bodied with a creamy, chocolate, roast coffee finish. It is midnight black in color and has a mocha aroma. It is hopped with Cascade hops, and is dark, smooth and not too heavy.

I wouldn't want to mess with him

The first thing that should stand out to you about these lineups is that while Colorado is clearly pandering to my hophead nature by rolling out three IPAs, one of which is a double IPA, Seattle is trending dark by rolling out a porter and a barley wine. We've seen in the past that IPAs do tend to dominate the Brewper Bowl, but then again, Baltimore won Brewper Bowl II on the back of an imperial porter, so we’ll see what happens. There was also a fair bit of trash talking on media day, as the Deviant Dales referred to the Hodgson’s Bitter End as a “mediocre IPA.” I’m curious as to how that tension manifests itself on the field of play.

The stage is set, the players are lined-up, and Brewper Bowl III is about to kick off. The Norm Peterson Trophy is on the line, along the fortune and glory of being admitted into the Pantheon of Brewper Bowl champions past. I can hardly contain my emotions here. To be continued…

Here’s to craft brewed happiness… Cheers!

The Next Great Beer War

Jim Koch, owner of Sam Adams (Boston Beer Co) and Sam
Calgione, owner of Dogfish Head

One of the most fascinating aspects of the craft beer industry has always been the sense of cooperation between brewers. This is something not often seen in other industries, where competition pits like businesses against one another. But in craft beer, it has always been us against them, where the “us” is craft beer and the “them” has been big beer. The thinking is, if we try to out-sell Budweiser, we will lose. They have more money, which leads to more marketing/advertising, bigger facilities, more volume, etc. But if we team up with each other and try to sell beer drinkers in localized markets on the idea of choosing craft instead of industrial swill, we can steal beer drinkers away from big beer much more effectively, and we all win.

So far, the results have spoken for themselves. Craft beer has grown exponentially at the expense of big beer, which has seen its respective market shares dwindle. Even in the doldrums of the recent economic trouble in our country, craft beer’s segment of the market has been doing quite well. Every year, more and more breweries are opened, and business is booming.

But is there a ceiling to all of this prosperity? Conventional economic logic says yes, although so far, we haven’t seen it. Is craft beer like so many other industries, where there is only so much room in the market for all these beer makers? Or is it more apt to compare craft beer to restaurants, in that it appears that there is endless room in the market for more and more businesses? I think it is a little bit of both, or in other words, it depends on your business model.

Up, up and away!

Getting back to that original idea in which small breweries don’t have to compete with big beer alone, but rather as a segment of the market competing against the big beer segment of the market – as the numbers show, that absolutely works to a point. But once a small brewery grows into a large brewery, it becomes a different ball of wax. Particularly when they grow out of their small, regional area and begin distributing into a larger swath of countryside, the competition with big beer becomes much more apparent.

Or perhaps, it’s not with big beer, but with other craft breweries that have also grown to behemoth proportions. You can still write off big beer because their product is inferior. But if a craft brewery from Boston, MA has grown into a national powerhouse with coast to coast distribution, and decides to try to sell beer in San Francisco, CA, a market with its own craft beer powerhouse, it is conceivable that there might not be enough room for both.

The latest offering from Sam Adams.

I brought up Boston and San Francisco on purpose, and no, it’s not because the Patriots and 49ers are still in the NFL playoffs and Brewper Bowl III is coming up – more on that in the coming weeks. I chose Boston and San Francisco because there are breweries from those respective cities that are in the craft beer headlines right now due to this very problem. To summarize, the owner of Lagunitas Brewing Company, from Petaluma, CA, Tony Magee, took to twitter recently to virtually abuse Sam Adams (Boston Beer Company) and their owner Jim Koch, for what he perceived as a territory grab. Magee is upset with a recent shift in Sam Adams targeting, with the addition of Sam Adams Rebel IPA, a west-coast style IPA. According to Magee, a mutual distributor of Lagunitas and Sam Adams was informed that Boston Beer means to take their (Lagunitas) tap handles wherever they could. In other words, replace Lagunitas taps with Sam Adams Rebel IPA taps in local bars in San Francisco, which is Lagunitas’ home market.

It should be stated in the name of bipartisanship that Jim Koch has not made an official declaration to this end, and even if he had, free market capitalism is, at least for now, the way America works. However, Jim Koch needs to be mindful of this developing problem from a PR standpoint, because his Boston Beer Company has been treading a fine line with the craft beer community for a long time, and most craft beer drinkers, if made to choose, will probably take Lagunitas’ side.

More likely, however, this real world scenario will probably go away in a few weeks, at least from the water (beer) cooler discussions. But it does illustrate a growing problem with the craft beer world - shelf space. Or more specifically, the lack thereof. To understand what I mean by that, you first must examine the laws of our great land.

To the gills. No more room here!

When the 21st Amendment repealed the Volstead Act and allowed us all to go back to legal drinking, one of the terms of the new law prohibited what was called vertical integration. Vertical Integration is defined as the combination in one company of two or more stages of production normally operated by separate companies. This was intended to prohibit one company (i.e. Budweiser) from owning the brewery, the distributor, and the store where the beer was sold, thus controlling the entire chain by which their product gets to the consumer. It was designed to prevent monopolies and make the marketplace fair for companies whose pockets weren't as deep as Budweiser’s.

The original beer war - prohibition.

Over time, big companies have devised a way to get around this government-mandated horizontal integration by bullying the distributors into favoring their products over their competitors. For example, say a very large brewery has a multi-million dollar contract with Sous Brewer Distribution, LLC (not a real thing by the way) and they decide that a smaller brewery is cutting into their market more than they would like.  They will go to Sous Brewer Distribution, LLC and tell them that if they don’t drop their 50,000 dollar contract with the smaller brewery, they will pull their multi-million dollar contract and give it to a different distributor. Obviously, Sous Brewer can’t afford to lose the main contract they have, so they very quickly drop the smaller contract with the smaller brewery. So even though it is illegal for the large brewery in this example to control the distributor, they essentially control the distributor anyway.

This is a pretty extreme scenario, but it does happen. More common terms and conditions of these underhanded deals include arrangements whereby the smaller brewery’s beers are moved down to the bottom shelf, or to a weird part of the store where nobody knows they’re there, or in the case of the bars, they get fewer kegs delivered, resulting in fewer tap handles that are placed at the end of the tap line where they’re not as prevalent. Bottom line – big breweries control distributors, resulting in unfair treatment of smaller breweries.

I’m not implying, as I have no way of knowing and haven’t done the research to conclude anything, that Boston Beer and Sam Adams are involved in any underhanded horizontal integration shenanigans involving Lagunitas, but if the tweet from Tony Magee has any merit to it, it certainly raises red flags. And the fact that big beer does this kind of garbage all the time means that it is possible. I’m not going so far as to call Sam Adams “big beer,” but they are the largest brewery considered by the Brewers Association to be a “craft brewery” and many in the craft community feel they are too big.

Watch your head.

This brings me back to our original discussion on whether there is a ceiling to the growth in the craft beer industry. In my opinion, the answer is yes and no. There is limited shelf space, and limited tap handles at the bars, so in theory, a particular market can only handle so many national-level brewers wheeling and dealing in their area. So from that standpoint, there is a ceiling, and like it or not, those national-level craft breweries are going to have to compete with each other and big beer simultaneously for those taps and that shelf space, particularly as more craft breweries decide to join the national discussion.

The reason I say yes AND no, and the reason I make a distinction between national-level brewers and regional brewers, is that regional brewers still have that advantage that craft beer has been exploiting all along – they can appeal to the sense of community and small business practices that allowed the Dogfish Heads and Stones and Sierra Nevadas of the world to grow in the first place. They are absolutely not competing against big beer, and can use the smaller distributors and retailers to ensure themselves taps and shelf space in their local market. Not to mention, they can defeat big beer and non-local beer by providing a quality product and appealing to the sense of local pride that most craft beer drinkers have inside them. The best part is, there is almost no limit to the amount of local breweries a market can support, as their consumers behave a lot like restaurant consumers do, in that if the beer is good and the price is right, they will always come back. Nobody ever says, “There are too many restaurants for the market to support in this town.” Why would they say that about breweries if the consumers of both behave the same way?

And most of them are craft breweries.

So at the risk of adding one more paragraph to an already long winded exposition on the craft beer industry’s growing pains, my advice to all of you is to go support your local brewers, enjoy all the craft beer you can get your hands on, and file everything you read here today as an interesting look into the inner-workings of the industry that provides you with your delicious craft-brewed deliciousness. But don’t worry too much because at the end of all of this, there will always be delicious craft beer for you to drink, and with any luck, we will one day defeat big beer once and for all (though that is still a long way out). And please wish all of those ambitious souls who want to enter the national-level beer war “good luck.” They’re going to need it.

Here’s to craft-brewed happiness… Cheers!

When Extraordinary Becomes Ordinary

A funny thing happens when people do something well - particularly when that something has never really been done well before. At first, it’s new and refreshing to witness this common thing in a better light. Many people, myself included, are enamored with the novelty of this enlightened twist on a previously mundane facet of their lives. But over time, the newly raised bar becomes the standard, and people begin to regard the upgrade as the new mundane. This leads the “doers” into a never-ending game of looking for ways to break the mold and amaze their target demographic the way they once did, leaving behind that original improvement as a piece of history, relegated to the “obviously” category. Or as the hipsters would say, “obvi.”

Totes magotes!

You guys know I’m talking about beer, right?

Believe it or not, the sorrowful tale detailed above is happening in the craft beer community. Long ago, circa 1980 (or so), there was very little good beer made in America. Decades of prohibitive federal laws and regulations, coupled with corporate takeovers, mass production, money-saving schemes and propaganda campaigns by major beer producers had watered-down all of the awesomeness that once was American beer.

Fortunately, a few heroes arrived on the scene in the early 80s and revolutionized the American, and by extension global, beer industry for good. They brought back concepts like using proper methods and proper ingredients. They experimented with styles that had been all but forgotten, and poured copious amounts of care, pride and passion into their beer. Clearly, the results were spectacular, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So many lagers, so little time

One of the first discrepancies these OGs of craft beer set out to fix was American lager, obviously because that style of beer had been perverted by big beer into the yellow, fizzy, industrial, mass-produced, swill that most Americans drank because that’s all there was to drink. By applying the aforementioned concepts, like proper ingredients and methods, as well as pride, passion, and all that jazz, they restored American lager to what it was supposed to be - something recognizable as the crisp, flavorful beer, made with cold-fermenting yeast that the Germans and Czechs had perfected centuries before. And for those adventurous souls who joined those heroes, this rejuvenated American lager was a spectacular breath of fresh air.

Once lagers had been restored, the craft revolutionaries set their sights on other projects, such as resurrecting styles like the IPA, stout, porter, etc. They continued to be met with success, and were praised and lauded by their ever-expanding fan base at every turn. This success, compounded over three decades, has brought us to the world we currently occupy, in which craft beer sees a 17% sales jump in 2012, even in the midst of a stagnant overall beer market and an uncertain American economy.

Doing that thing you do.

But as I alluded to in the opening stanza, success breeds more success, or at least, the necessity for more success. Otherwise you’re a one-hit-wonder like the Oneders. That pressure to continue amazing people leads to brewers constantly seeking to brew the next big thing – the next trending style – the next interesting ingredient – the next hop bomb, high gravity monster or high alcohol face-melter. Now don’t get me wrong… THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. But it does leave us with the following quandary – what about that American lager that started it all? Is it now part of the mundane?

In my opinion, the answer is “absolutely not.” It’s easy to regard lagers as “boring,” particularly when you try to compare them to all of the other beers out there that we are capable of making. Lagers are supposed to be simple and unflashy, given their Reinheitsgebot roots, but that is not a reason to pigeonhole them into mediocrity. A properly made lager can still dazzle with it’s attention to the style and overall refreshing attributes. Lagers are particularly wonderful on a hot day when you sit down in the shade and want to cool off. I, for one, love it when a brewery has a lager on their flight, and that lager tastes like a lager is supposed to taste. It shows me the brewer is not just showing off, but rather understands the subtle intricacies of all styles of beer – even the simpler ones.

Victory over big beer! The war is over!

This theory can be applied to all styles of beer… not just lagers. At the end of the day, if a beer is made with proper ingredients and methods, and is true to the style the brewer says they were aiming for, it’s a victory against big beer shenanigans, and must therefore be celebrated. I’m not saying that we are not allowed to be choosy, as it was the desire for more variety and higher quality that started all of this in the first place. What I’m saying is, we must not allow our human compulsion of “bigger, stronger, faster” to cloud the fact that some beers are supposed to be simple, and that simple does not mean dull.

In other words, give lagers a chance. They can be delicious and various just like all craft beer. In fact, I think I wrote a blog post many years ago all about lagers and how diverse they can be. I think I’ll give you a link to that post because I’m feeling extra generous this morning. You’re welcome.

Here’s to craft-brewed happiness… Cheers!