Is The Age of the Flagship Beer Over?

This here marks the second entry in a loosely connected series exploring the development and evolution of a new brewery's beer lineup, and how a brewery goes about refining such a thing. Part one went into the background of what we decided we should brew at Kent Falls, while a third future installment will eventually expand on the evolution of a particular beer, our Field Beer farmhouse ale. Field Beer was, from the start, intended to be sort of a 'conceptual' flagship ale, embodying an ethos that represented the whole brewery, if not necessarily leading the brewery in sales or release volumes.

Everyone knows that craft beer has dramatically shifted the way that the whole of the adult beverage market works. Before I even jumped into the process of helping to launch a new brewery, and planning and brainstorming and stressing and speculating what beers that I wanted to make would also be practical and sellable to the public, I had noticed something interesting about the way that breweries present themselves to their consumers. For years, maybe ever since the craft beer movement first began, its trajectory has been that of slowly and silently killing the model of flagship beer offerings. It has been one long history of flipping the way in which a brewery works.

For years, a brewery was a brand. Not a place or destination or personality or cult or whatever breweries are to the public now. The clarity and message of the brand was the product; the brewery as a personality was only really relevant so far as it was part of the brand. You didn't expect them to change what they were doing or switch things up on a regular basis. You were either on board with their brand, or you weren't. And while most of these brands did offer several products, they were usually slight variations on that initial core brand. Rather than releasing a distinct new brand with a separate identity, for example, you marketed a "light" version of your existing flagship brand.

Until recently, and even probably still now, this had a huge impact on how the average person would think about and discuss beer. For decades, the focus had been on a brewery as a brand. So that when you would talk to people about beer, most people would say things like "I had that Dogfish Head beer last night," or "You know what you would like? This one beer from back home, Troegs... you'd like it." And so on. The previous model of brewery-as-brand still greatly affects how the average person sees a brewery-as-a-business, even though it hasn't been that way for most breweries in decades. How many breweries today focus almost all their efforts on one single beer brand?

I mentioned that I view this as a slow trajectory, and I think there is an evolution in brewery identity that has been going on since the 70's. Those people that talk about a brewery as if they only make one beer would be wrong in almost every case, but you can understand why, if they don't really have much interest in the nerdy details of the beer industry, they might see a brewery like Sierra Nevada as a singular brand largely embodied by Pale Ale. That type of consumer would only rarely notice that there are other offerings from the brewery, and if so, probably understands that seasonals and special releases are a thing, and don't detract from the core identity of the brewery/brand. In the first wave of craft beer, this view would still basically be perceiving things accurately. Sierra Nevada was built by Pale Ale. That is still the core of their identity, though they happen to make many other products, too. And to the public, Sam Adams is just... Sam Adams. That's the beer. That's the brewery. That's the brand. But because they're a craft brand, sure, they also do sometimes have a seasonal release on tap as well. In the majority of bars, ordering a Sam Adams would create zero confusion. Only the pedantic beer nerd would protest: "But they make like 300 beers! Which one do you mean???"

The founders of the craft beer revolution largely stuck close to the existing model, focusing on flagship brands, but generally expanding this concept into having a group of "core" offerings, plus seasonals. This became the basic template for almost every brewery of the next several decades. Gradually, though, the obviousness of the flagship offering (and its singularity as the brewery's identifying brand) eroded. A flagship became merely the most prominent beer in a broader lineup of core offerings. Is 60 Minute the most popular and common product made by Dogfish Head? Sure, but they're a brand built on experimentation, and thus variety; it would be hard to miss that bigger picture.

One or two flagships bolstered by seasonals and special releases soon became half a dozen core lineup beers bolstered by seasonals and special releases. Much of this shift was likely tied to the resurgence of the brewpub, which, for most casual beer consumers, would start to define their image of what a brewery was. At a brewpub, having a clear and obvious single flagship isn't necessary, and from a branding perspective, doesn't even really make sense. As more and more began to define this new wave of breweries by their Friday-night-dinner experiences at a brewpub, the expectation that a brewery would offer a lineup of six, up to maybe ten core offerings, with a few side experiments that change every now and then, worked its way into our consciousness. And I'd say that's maybe where we've been for the last twenty years or so.

In that sense, the flagship beer is kind of already dead. Most breweries now don't expect to have one huge mega-hit that accounts for 90% of sales. In the rare cases where that does happen, it looks shockingly anomalous. How weird was it that The Alchemist, one of the most talked about and sought-after craft breweries in the world for a good part of this decade, only made and sold a single beer for a long chunk of that time? That Heady Topper stood as the sole offering of an immensely popular and beloved brewery was highly unusual for the time, probably because it wasn't even the brewery's intention for this to happen, but the whim's of fate and the wrath of mother nature.

Starting a new farmhouse brewery in a demographically-oddball rural area, we knew that a tart saison (or any kind of saison) was going to be a hard sale as Kent Fall's primary brand. You'd be surprised at how hard it is to sell large volumes of saison in the current beer market. Yes, I know, that probably sounds like a personal problem. "Have you considered that you only think that because you are terrible and no one likes you or your beer?" is probably your response, and while you are right, don't take my word for it. Ask any brewery that's producing a lot (or a majority) of farmhouse ale — unless their product is sour or barrel-aged. It may seem like saisons are super hot right now, but I think beer nerds talk about saison more than the general drinking public actually buys them in large quantities. In other words, it's a style that may do really well in special release formats (especially, again, if it's barrel-aged or has fruit or some other specialty situation), but saison is not dominating volume the way that, say, IPAs are, or session IPAs for example, or fruited IPAs, or to pick another random example, fruited session IPAs, or fruited session IPAs with citrus zest, or hard root beer. Saison is one of those styles that's beloved, but puts you in a weird spot if you want to make a lot of it.

Anyway, we anticipated this when thinking about our core lineup of beers, and came up with several concepts for "core" beers, though being that most of them were still in the farmhouse vein, we still ended up brewing for variety much more than we had anticipated. I'm guessing this is a common experience for many new breweries these days, unless you're focusing on hoppy beers for your flagships. Hoppy beers are probably the category that remains very easily (very easily) sellable as flagships or core brands, but in order to start off pushing hoppy beers as your primary offering, you either need to have put in the planning years in advance to procure awesome hop contracts from the start, or else be so small that you can still round up the hops you need from spot and trading. In other words, I don't think there are many styles remaining that are particularly easy to push as your flagship offering. And that may be a symptom of how drastically the entire brewing industry has changed. Variety, for now, is king. The real interesting question for me, is: just how sustainable is a model of "variety, always" actually is for every type of brewery, big and small?

If you enjoy my writing or reading about fermentation in general, please consider pre-ordering my book, The Fermented Man, on Amazon, and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more regular updates.

My Experiences Developing the Beer Lineup for a New Brewery

Some breweries start out from the beginning with carefully engineered marketing strategies, while others take a more free-form, off-the-cuff approach to their products, based on whatever the brewer wants to do next. Most, of course, probably begin with a fuzzy mixture of both strategies. Before finally producing our first beer in February 2015, Barry and I spent about 9 months brewing up a storm of trial batches for only a mere handful of the initial offerings of Kent Falls Brewing Co. It's hilarious how much time — months and months — was spent trialing just a couple beers, compared to the staggering number of beers we've released since then, most of them with minimal test batch experimentation.

For most of the planning phase, we only knew that we would be making one or two particular beers for certain. Being a farmhouse brewery, our first beer was obviously going to be a saison. At the time, the concept of a seasonally rotating farmhouse ale called Field Beer was kind of our intended flagship beer — although we weren't entirely sure what that even meant, for a brewery like ours. Before I became involved, Barry had the artwork, name, and general concept in place. It would be a farmhouse ale that used all local ingredients, including raw grains (oat, spelt, wheat, and rye) that would change with each season. Once I started on with the company, we got to work developing a recipe, deciding on the structure of the beer (clean, funky, sour, wood-aged, etc) and refining the house saison culture that would ferment it. Farmhouse ales can go in a lot of different directions, and at that point we figured we'd only be making one or two saisons (excluding limited barrel-aged stuff) over the course of our first year. After all, with only three tanks and two yeast strains, how many different beers could you possibly make?

The amount of time spent developing those few initial beer concepts was severely disproportionate, in retrospect. Shortly after starting to sort out Field Beer, we settled on our second "core" beer. I had been spending much of my own homebrewing energy, over the several years previous, perfecting my ideal hiking beer, a Brett IPA, and I thought it would be badass to open up with a tart saison and a Brett IPA as flagship beers. As we still drifted through a dozen saison culture variations, we started refining my existing Brett IPA recipe with new yeast strains. Due to the nature of the types of beers I wanted to make, most of the R&D efforts were actually yeast related. Homebrewing gives you the opportunity to very casually and without any real pressure test out different yeast profiles in similar foundational beers over... well, all the time you want. Opening up a brewery, all of a sudden you're in this mad crunch to make sure you found the best possible combination of saison yeast out there. The best, most consistent, must management, most reliable Brett culture. How can you possibly test out all the thousands of different variations and combinations in time before you need to have a recipe locked in?

But then there's the other strange challenges of developing your brewery lineup. When thinking of how to name and label my Bear Flavored beers, ideas came easy. I had a stockpile of images and endless ideas for names, but they all pretty directly channeled my own personal weirdnesses and aesthetic inclinations, and I wasn't bouncing them off of anyone else. Branding, for a brewery that isn't just your own, is a far greater challenge. Everything had to funnel together the different visions of everyone involved, while representing the amalgamation of the brewery identity as a whole — whatever that was. We were still figuring it out, after all, in how we chose to name and label the beers.

Finding a name for our Brett IPA was, oddly enough, possibly the most difficult single thing in the whole long process — as far as creative spontaneity, failed solutions, and time spent before coming up with something that finally worked. We bounced ideas around for at least a month. At my birthday party that year, I passed around a notepad and had friends write down ideas, then vote on favorites. For the longest time, we couldn't quite nail it. But once one idea clicks, it's weird how immediately and easily other ideas click, and the whole trajectory of what you're doing inexorably shifts. Finally, possibly by accident, someone came up with"Waymaker" as the name, and at last, a name actually stuck. I remember thinking about adding coffee to the Brett IPA. Suddenly it hit me: Coffeemaker! The name came with zero effort, because it just made sense, and was kind of dumb and tongue-in-cheek, which is very much Kent Fall's. What about adding fruit to the Brett IPA? Juicemaker! Et cetera. It can take a month to lock-in one concept, and then only hours to establish a quarter dozen more.

You'll hear, from new breweries, that you can never fully anticipate what your first few years will be like. Business plans are just a nice idea you create to show to investors and the bank. Reality will dictate the real flow of the business, and it will almost never resemble the plan. But usually these reflections on the insane momentum of running a brewery are in relation to production growth and sales and whatnot. I suppose, for better or worse, we had a far more flexible vision of what our brewery identity would even be than most do. Or maybe not, even. I don't know. We had a very good idea of the types of beers we would make at Kent Falls. We were going to focus on farmhouse ales and sours and Northeast-style IPAs and a couple stouts here and there with the other varied oddball experiments on the side. In other words, I was going to continue to brew basically the same beers I would have been brewing as a homebrewer anyway.

But amidst all the things we wanted to make, we assumed we would have to start out making only a few of them. Produce a lineup of half a dozen or so core beers that would see relatively frequent distribution, and fill in the edges with some other stuff, some more limited adventures. That's how breweries work, right? I made charts and graphs and notebook scribblings about flagships and brew frequency and hop usages. We assumed that, as brewers, you just sort of establish those things, and the market drinks them up, mostly, and you see what does better and what's weak and go from there. Scale up on some things and scale down others.

One of the main factors determining these initial beers, the focus of a "core" lineup, is yeast. As a homebrewer, this is something you're aware of, but it doesn't dictate your brewing the way it will professionally. And in plotting out your brewery, you will realize just how limiting this sort of planning can be. Especially if you to want to do some oddball things with unique yeast cultures, or if you want to use certain yeast cultures, but only sporadically. Now, you either have to have an in-house yeast propagation system of some sort (which could be costly, eat up the floor space of your tiny brewery, and would demand more man-hours that you don't have), or you have to stick to using the same yeast for at least several batches in a row. Ordering a fresh pitch of yeast for each batch would be a significant cost; money that could be better spent more efficiently. So your schedule is, to a large extent, dictated by how many yeast strains you're able to bring into the brewery, how long you can / plan to keep them going for, and how affordable it is for you to order yeast cultures here and there that you only plan to use for a few batches. There's a reason that most breweries brew 95% of their beers with one house strain, and there's a reason it's usually a nice versatile American or British strain.

In practical terms, if you want one of your core beers to be a 100% Brett IPA with a unique yeast culture that the market still barely understands, that means you have to either brew that beer essentially all the time (hoping it will work as a true year-round flagship), or alternate it with a few other beers (using that same unusual yeast culture) to space out batches and not flood the market. Or finally, you could brew the one beer a couple times for one period of the year, then dump the yeast and switch to a new culture for that tank. Here was a new challenge: how many different beers could I come up with to be fermented with a 100% Brett culture that regular bars and restaurants would be willing to repeatedly buy? Coming up with these ideas in a homebrew setting is one thing, but now, as a production brewery in an area without a ton of craft beer-centric bars, you have to convince numerous bars and restaurants and beer halls to take in kegs of your wacky ideas. As much as I really wanted to brew a 100% Brett IPA as a core beer, could I really sustain the culture as a year-round thing?

Originally, due to the nature of the beers, some practical yeast management concerns, and the whole general Figuring This Out process, we didn't want to bring in a third yeast culture beyond our saison and Brett cultures. We had three tanks. Three tanks, to keep two yeast cultures alive and healthy. We had to devise a core lineup of beers around those two unique house cultures. It was actually quite a fun challenge. It forced me to be creative, but ultimately allowed us to brew most of the stuff that I wanted to focus our core lineup on anyway. We'd be brewing a Brett IPA (and several variations thereof), goses, and an assortment of saisons. The only types of beers that I was fond of but that I couldn't really get to, with that setup, were clean IPAs. But those could wait to come in later, especially as we were waiting to build up our hop resources. And still are — hop contracts are a whole other logistics nightmare that I won't even dive into here.

But the market is a force with a strong will — a will that is fortunately pretty easy to interpret, in this industry — and we were in a position to be adaptable. Or at least a mindset to be adaptable. The nature of our lineup was not set in stone. And the nature of our lineup — the beers I made in the first year, but more precisely how often I made each of them — was something that was shaped by the sort of responses we saw. As it happened, the market seemed to demand the type of brewing I was most comfortable with anyway. The type of brew schedule I would prefer to do regardless, because it's the same approach I took as a curious homebrewer with a terrible attention span. The market demanded variety. I like variety. We found that beers moved fastest, and thus were served fresh and at their peak quality, when we didn't brew any one beer too much all at once. With a few months in between releases — and a number of beers released only on an annual basis — the market could "miss" things they hadn't had in a while, rather than getting bombarded with the same offerings constantly. This realization isn't new — there's a reason why seasonals and one-offs have become such a big thing, even for older, flagship-oriented breweries — but I think this dichotomy is growing more and more prevalent and unavoidable. Perhaps our experience would have been less extreme if we had a tasting room or a brewpub, and regular patrons expecting certain things to always be there. But we had to build a brewery brand based on distribution only, and thus, the frequently-rotating taplists of other people's bars. Beer bars inherently favor variety these days. So, not by calculated planning or lengthy board meetings or strategy sessions, but by instinct and reflex and a readiness to embrace experimentation at the first opportunity, we became the type of brewery that releases about 50 distinct beers in its first year of operation.

We saw quickly that the market likes variety. This is great for me, because I also like variety, and I like brewing different things. But the degree to which the market pushed us toward variety was still shocking to me. And it made me question: is the flagship (or core lineup) model of brewing, at least for small new breweries, starting to die? How much will the rotating nature of beer bar draft lists shape the future of the brewing business?

More thoughts on that over the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you enjoy my writing or reading about fermentation in general, please consider pre-ordering my book, The Fermented Man, on Amazon, and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more regular updates.

What is Brett IPA Supposed to Taste Like?

When I agreed to be the brewmaster at Kent Falls Brewing Co., the first thing that Barry, the co-owner and brewery manger, told me was: "Make sure the beer is as confusing as possible. I don't care what you brew. I don't care what it tastes like. I just want everything to be the maximum amount of confusing."

We're working at all sorts of inventive, cutting-edge ways of confounding beer consumers, like making a lightly-sour saison one of our core beers (for the mainstream Connecticut market), and releasing a refreshingly soft table saison that clocks in at only 3.8% and is dry-hopped with American hops, so if you want to call it a saison, that's fine, but if you want to call it a table beer, that works too, or if you just want to consider it a farmhouse ale, technically yes, it's that also.

Actually, those two beers have been received shockingly well, even the incredibly low-ABV saison. One of my Things lately is that over-explaining this stuff to people from the very start can be detrimental; just give the beer to them, they will taste it and realize it tastes very good, and not have to try to pretend to care about all the style complexities your inner nerd is dying to spit out in exhausting detail at them. Start with flavor and educate based on what they like and their interest level. Unfortunately, though, that only works when you're starting from a blank slate. When the person drinking the beer has half-formed preconceptions, things get trickier.

Brett IPAs are weird. Often, the very people that need to be educated on what a Brett IPA is supposed to taste like, what makes it tick, are those same beer nerds who actually sort of understand what Brettanomyces is. Lots of beer drinkers know: Brettanomyces makes beer funky. It's associated (confusingly, it turns out) with sour beer. But it isn't usually responsible for the acidity in beer, just the funk — and maybe a bigger push of tartness due to the low residual sugars it leaves behind. Brett is as weird and hard to pin down as it is intriguing and complex.

I've written about this before, but now that I'm commercially brewing a 100% Brett beer that, theoretically, thousands and thousands of people (oh shit whoa wait that's weird) are going to taste, I feel like I need to get it out there again: what is a 100% Brett beer supposed to taste like? What is it? Why is it?

100% Brett beers, in general, do not follow the rules that aged, mixed-culture Brett beers do. Being already a mouthfeel, that's hard to explain to someone over a shouted bar order. A year in a barrel with Brettanomyces simply changes a beer in ways that a quick 2-6 week fermentation (our Brett IPA only takes 7 days to ferment out completely, now that the culture has adapted) won't match. Faster, in beer, usually means less intense, sometimes possibly simpler. 100% Brett beers, fermented quickly, are in no way inferior, just different. They bear a different flavor profile. Their funk is a different kind of funk. They're maybe less intense, but their impression of Brettanomyces character is distinct and readily apparent to anyone familiar with it. I've drank enough 100% Brett beers that I think I could still pick one out of a lineup if my hair was on fire and someone was trying to put it out with a dirty hiking sock full of old trash. Trust me, 100% Brett character may be subtler, but it is unique and identifiable, just different from its aged incarnation.

In many 100% Brett beers, you will find crisp notes of zest, possibly some phenols (though most seem to prefer these beers without much of the phenolic notes), usually a hard-to-pin fruit character, and something like dried sweat. That dried sweat is tastier than it sounds, like berries that are cooling off after running a marathon. But this sweaty note, usually what I perceive as the most funky element of a 100% Brett beer as compared to an aged Brett beer, is still fairly tame and subtle, in the way that an anthropomorphic fruit sweating would be far more appealing than an actual human sweating, But, most importantly, 100% Brett beers don't usually approach full barnyard. And they might be mildly tart, at best, but not actually acidic. Brett doesn't make beer overtly sour. It may create an impression of tartness, but a 100% Brett beer is not going to be full-on sour.

That's the general gist, but each 100% Brett beer will of course be slightly different, depending on the brewer's preference and how they steer it. The general consumer is very likely not to know all this upfront, as a lot of confusion regarding Brettanomyces remains. I've heard from many brewers that this has broken them on the style. They've gotten so much misguided negative feedback, often from the very beer nerds that seek out Brett beers, they simply stopped brewing the beer. This is deeply frustrating and sad to hear. And as with any matter of education, it's up to us handsome, knowledgeable few to address this.

Personally, my goal for a Brett IPA is to have that same juicy, aromatic, fruity, refreshing, accessible, not-very-bitter-at-all-actually beverage that I already seek in a good clean IPA, but with a slight edge of Brett pushing the fruit hop character down minor paths tangential from the usual. The brunt of hops, with an undercurrent of something just slightly strange but equally refreshing. I've been working on a Brett IPA recipe for years as my perfect hiking beer, because that's what I want on top of a mountain. Refreshing, but a little wild, a little disorienting. Not cloying or clobbering or overly severe. I want a beer that tastes like a glass of juice from an unknown alien species of fruit.

That, to me, is what Kent Fall's Waymaker Brett IPA tastes like. I'll write more about this specific beer and the history behind my brewing it more extensively in the future, but for now, I just want to write about how it doesn't taste how you might expect. It's probably not nearly as funky as you'd think. While unfortunately I'm sworn to secrecy about the particular strains of Brett we're using (it's a blend of a number of strains, not one single Brett), these particular Bretts are rather clean as a primary fermenter, with just a bit of that funky zest I find in 100% Brett ferments. They work fast: the first batch was a bit funkier due to me knocking out too cold, and the batch taking longer than expected to ferment, but since then, this beer finishes up just as quickly as a Saccharomyces-fermented ale. There's an edge to the beer, like a weird glass of orange juice spiked with some guava juice, but the fruit and the citrus and the juice is very much the focus. It recreates much of the flavors of an IPA, but many of those flavors happen to come as much from the yeast as from the hops. That's the point. I can't decide whether that's the point of a 100% Brett beer to some hypothetical consumer; I can only offer that that is the point of this particular 100% Brett beer to me, as a brewer.

One Untappd review amusingly said, simply: "I've been had." I'm not even sure in which direction they were insinuating they'd been tricked, misled, which is the frustrating aspect of such things: did they think this wasn't enough of an IPA, or wasn't enough of a Brett beer? Too funky, or not funky enough? My favorite thing about this beer is how much it balances both aspects of what it is in equal portions, but maybe that's a negative to you. Either way, in either direction, I really just can't particularly allow it to bother me, because Waymaker tastes exactly like I want it to. And my job, then, is to help show drinkers what a 100% Brett beer can be, what new things it can offer, rather than playing to whatever misconceptions and erroneous goals they may have formed for it. In my mind, this is a style of beer that did not and could not have existed before, I don't know, ten years ago. Naturally, it will lead to some confusion.

What it tastes like is far more important than all the nerdy details surrounding its fermentation. What it tastes like, I hope people agree, is refreshing and juicy and interesting. Wild enough for the top of a mountain, unique enough for a tulip at the bar. So wherever it is that you drink it, whether or not it tastes like a glass of weird orange juice to you too, I just hope that you enjoy it for what it is. The same should probably be true for all beer, come to think of it.

Why We Should Take Beer Styles Less Seriously

Random photo of beer of indeterminable style.

Get ready for some more opinion-based rambling, folks. The views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Bear Flavored Ales' Board of Directors.

I suspect this article may make a lot of people want to throw beer bottles at me. Or I don't know — maybe this is actually a common feeling that we just don't talk about much. The Brewer's Association recently released a massive overhaul of its Beer Style Guidelines for 2014, and it's encouraging to see recognition of rapidly-growing categories of beer, but many entries nonetheless make me think that the effort is largely a shell game. Certainly beer styles do get argued about a lot — wars have been fought over the black IPA; drinkers shruggingly accepting that session IPA is a tad different from a boring old pale ale — but generally, we all seem to be working under the assumption of there being a sacred realm of 'classic and traditional' styles that everyone, thank god, can at least agree on. There's the stable ground of history, and then there's these whacky new styles like 'Brett IPA' and "imperial black rye coffee Kolsch" that are just some nonsense the kids are pulling out of their baggy pants at dubstep concerts with which to spike their Red Bull. 

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the concept of beer styles. Sometimes life needs simplicity and guideposts. We need styles, and we like to argue about styles; I just think we often place far too much emphasis on them. Especially from a consumer standpoint, it's very important to have at least a broad guideline, a rough sketch of what I'm going to drink. It doesn't have to be a classic style; it can be a little blurb, a few descriptive words. (For example: I love how much info Modern Times manages to convey on their cans despite a very minimalist design.) When I pick up a bottle and there's no style or description at all, nothing but a cute name and a government warning, I become so annoyed that I will almost never buy that beer. Give me at least an idea of what the beer is — however you want to do that. That's what styles are for: guidelines, shorthand, a marker to let you know how close you are to town. And as long as we're not taking things too seriously, I think it mostly works out.

Lately — and maybe this is just because I happen to be on a binge of historical-brewing literature — I feel like the concept of "brewing to style" is being chipped away at from both the past and the future. There's going to be some unexpected benefit to the genre of IPA spawning a thousand spin-offs, in my opinion. The names might sound silly, but ideally, hopefully, it'll help to enforce the idea that styles are not immutable and handed down from the Heavens on stone tablets: they're coined after the fact, to classify something that looks like it'll be sticking around long enough to need a name.

The thing is, styles and beers change. Everything changes. In fact, I would go as far as to say that most beer styles as we think of them today did not exist 150 years ago. A brewer from the mid 1800's would probably be at a loss, trying to enter a modern BJCP-sanctioned contest. Classic and traditional? Sure, depending when you want to set the start date.

Think about it: around the end of the 1900's, within a couple decades' time, a great many things happened all at once. There was a sweeping overhaul of fermentation procedure thanks to the work of Pasteur. Two World Wars happened, drastically affecting the availability of ingredients and the taxation system imposed upon European and English breweries. Gravities dropped, processes changed. Lager-mania shifted a new generation's tastes, right when mass industrialization was becoming easier than ever. Oh, and let's not forget, there was that whole Prohibition horseshit. American brewing was perhaps the hardest hit by these few turbulent decades, but the rich historical traditions of English and European brewing were drastically affected as well, something that modern drinkers rarely seem to recognize when touting the legacy of international brewers.

I'll pick one specific example, saison, because I was just leafing through Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski again. Something struck me: Farmhouse Ales was released in 2004, following a period where the saison style could have been considered on the verge of extinction. Not so long after that book came out (and this was probably not a coincidence), the style exploded onto the American scene. In 2014, only ten years later, I would say that saisons are one of craft beer's darlings, a style that a significant percentage of breweries brew on a regular basis. As of this writing, there are over 3,000 saisons logged on beeradvocate.com... more than twice as many as any other Belgian style. That's crazy! I had to look multiple times at those numbers to make sure I wasn't losing my mind — how could saisons be twice as common as witbiers, dubbels and tripels? But it seems to be so, perhaps because the style is generally viewed as loose in its guidelines, historically and conceptually open-ended.

But given all that, the vast majority of saisons being brewed today are pale, moderately hopped, highly carbonated, frequently spiced, and fermented exclusively with a Saccharomyces "saison strain." Perhaps no beer defines the modern saison better than Saison Dupont — I mean really defines, in that Saison Dupont, just one example of European saison, seems to have formed the baseline for the entire modern vision of what a saison should be. But Dupont was only one farmhouse ale, one that happened to survive the difficult first half the century with its integrity in-tact, and remain available enough that American drinkers could discover it when they were ready for it. Historically, there were many different farmhouse beers, and they varied quite a lot. Farmhouse Ales describe most as probably being a bit more amber in color due to historic malting techniques, and being either aggressively hopped or distinctly sour. More sour, depending on age, and sometimes blended with lambic, or even spontaneously fermented. Carbonation, before bottling became the norm, was probably low. Alcohol levels were also much lower, because farmhouse ale was largely brewed as sustenance for farmhands working the fields.

In fact, the primary common thread between historic and contemporary saisons is the reliance on a highly-attenuative yeast strains to result in a low terminal gravity; saisons, whatever else they are, should be dry and refreshing. But what started out as a style closely related to lambic is now almost universally fermented by a culture of brewer's yeast, and usually packs a heavy ABV punch. That these strains have been isolated from European saison brewers gives them credibility, but isn't going to match what historic saisons once were. Even allowing for the fact that saisons were varied and open-ended, the general loss of some of their most widespread qualities in modern examples sounds to me like we've basically redefined the baseline of what the style is, to a degree that would cause uproar if done with, say, an American gueuze.

Though it's not on the sour spectrum and its funk is not too extreme, even Saison Dupont still contains a mix of microbes — White Labs found as many 5 different cultures, and other brewers I have talked to (who have done their own culturing) report the same findings. One strain within the Dupont culture seems to lend the vast majority of the character to the beer, however, so this is strain was selected as the "Dupont strain." But does an ecosystem really function the same way when seemingly-vestigial organisms are dropped?

For as fettishistic as brewers are about the purity of other styles, the use of the term 'lambic' or the blasphemy of calling something a 'Black IPA,' I find it little funny that this reincarnation of the saison slipped through without judgement. Especially when Farmhouse Ales probably inspired it, though the book goes to great lengths describing the beer as very different from how most of us are brewing it.

I don't want to sound like I'm just pooping on American saisons (though I would definitely like to start seeing much weirder, funkier, tartier saisons), because it's a style that I (mostly) love regardless of how it's interpreted. To be clear, this is an issue of semantics, not quality. If you brew a monoculture-fermented, moderately hopped, highly carbonated golden ale and call it a saison, you're not doing anything wrong. It is a saison. That's my whole point: we changed what the style it is. Styles are the Matrix, and we are all Neo, #MINDBLOWN #INCEPTIONSOUND

So back to my overall point of brewing to style: how much can it mean when we keep changing what those very styles are? You could run through this whole thing with almost any 'historic' style. Last year I went through this with India Pale Ale: historic IPA, [contemporary] English IPA, and American IPA are all three pretty different things, which makes the sudden proliferation of IPA sub-styles seem a little less ridiculous. I mean, still a little ridiculous in terms of marketing and bandwagoning, but slightly less so.

Everything has basically been tried by someone before and yet everything is new and ever-changing. I'll leave it to future generations to argue about what to call their THC-infused quintuple IPA brewed by a matrix of self-pitching nano-yeast, growler-filtered via cross-secting dubstep vibrational frequencies. I will yell at them to get off my lawn and continue listening to Led Zeppelin.

Taste trumps semantics. I just want my beer to be weird and interesting and tasty and refreshing.






.... Okay, maybe all I'm really saying here is, if I ever have kids, I want them to grow up having very strong opinions about the microbial content of saisons.

Inside the Brewery at Bacchus - The Most Interesting Brewery in NY That You've Never Heard Of

The Brewery at Bacchus 

4 South Chestnut Street 
New Paltz, NY 12561
Website: www.bacchusnewpaltz.com
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It's rare that a brewery this promising opens this quietly, but the Brewery at Bacchus is a strange case all around. If you haven't heard of them, it's not because you aren't tuned in to the New York beer scene. This is a brewery that's going to take a lot of people by surprise.

For starters: how many breweries in New York do you know of doing funky Brett saisons, farmhouse ales aged on fruit, dark sours, 100% Brett IPAs, whiskey-aged imperial stouts, while utilizing a comprehensive (though small) barrel program? Bacchus has tackled all of these so far, and well. All in the mere six months since their first beer was released.

The main reason you may not have noticed the brewery's opening — even if you live in the area — is that things at Bacchus don't look to have actually changed much, from the outside. Bacchus, a restaurant and bar that's been a staple of the town for years, is located in busy New Paltz, NY. About an hour and a half north of New York City, surrounded by farmland and the looming profile of the Shawangunk Ridge, New Paltz is a Main Street-oriented college town best known for hippies and hikers. I've felt for a while that the Hudson Valley is lousy with opportunity as a beer-tourism destination, and few towns convey why as immediately as New Paltz. The horizon, with the Shawangunks not far in the distance, is just stupidly gorgeous and instantly memorable, and the vibe in the area is as charming as it comes. The town seems to have been uprooted and transplanted wholesale from some valley in Colorado — where, you know, having at least two breweries per town is kind of a thing.

Ad Infinitum imperial IPA.

Bacchus — the restaurant and bar that preceded and still largely overshadows the brewery — was already a fairly curious place. According to its own website, the building has been host to a fascinating past life: "...at various times a Chinese laundry, litho shop, taxi station, barber shop, a cafe, [and] a porno photography studio." Finally settling on a Tex-Mex restaurant with a pub-like downstairs bar in 1974, Bacchus was off to a fine start. Add to that an attached billiards hall and suddenly you have a multi-tasking establishment that's still pretty well suited to a college town. And New Paltz very much is a college town: the crowd at any business on Main Street skews young and counter-culture.

But Bacchus was never in danger of becoming a frat bar (if New Paltz even has anything resembling frats, which I doubt). The restaurant has been known as the craft beer spot for the town for a number of years, partly due to the influence of Jason Synan, a homebrewer and beer-lover that manages the bar. Then, two years ago, Jason Synan and his brewing partner Mike Renganeschi were in a staff meeting pouring homebrew for other Bacchus employees when the owners suggested: hey, your beer is good, let's put a brewery in too.

From an outsider's perspective, it could easily seem like a case of "why not?" And from a cynic's perspective, not knowing better, you'd expect such an addition to an already-sprawling restaurant enterprise might default to safe, inoffensive standards. You know, the same five beers every new brewery needs to make so they don't scare off mainstream drinkers. Adding a brewpub to this already-sprawling list of projects kind of seems risky, on the face of it. Why would this weird college-town Frankenstein building — a Mexican restaurant, college bar, and billiards hall, built on the bones of a taxi station and porn studio — strive to be something unique and unexpected?

Maybe I've answered my own question. Bacchus is no one thing, and once you give yourself the space to stand back from it all, there's some kind of weird logic to it all.

Even the building itself, as I would learn, is a sprawling labyrinth. I joked with Jason and Mike that their brewery probably fulfills the misconceptions the average person has about how a brewpub works: in this case, beer is literally produced from some pots in the back of the kitchen, behind the dish-washing station. While the brewers share horror stories of the aggressive kitchen-bred wild yeast that ruined one early batch, the setup would seem to humble brewing to just another culinary process. The brewhouse itself is set up in a former cold room, with two fermenters and four brite tanks staged just outside, next to shelves of spices and Maraschino cherries. The brewery seems poised halfway between convenience and chaos. But then there's the massive basement, laid out below the restaurant and bar — and floating somewhere above that, a sort of loft space that serves as the brewery's barrel room and grain storage. It's all very labyrinthian — given the Greek / Roman references that the guys' fall back on for their beers, there's gonna have to be a Theseus / Minotaur homage dropped at some point.

Mike and Jason share my taste in beer, so it's hard to contain my excitement at what they're doing with The Brewery at Bacchus. There are a very, very few breweries in New York willing to experiment with Brett or sour beer, yet the gentlemen at the Brewery at Bacchus are devoting almost their whole program to these experiments, and frequently barrel-aging their creations as long as necessary, until they're ready to drink. With two brew-days per week, Jason and Mike usually focus on a non-wild, quicker turn-around beer for one, and something more experimental for the other.

Mike Renganeschi crushes grain in the barrel room.

So here's the most important information I could share about the Brewery at Bacchus, the stuff you really want to know. So far, Jason and Mike have brewed:

Ad Infinitum - This 10% ABV DIPA is as close to a flagship beer as Bacchus has, if only because it's the closest they've come to brewing a beer on multiple occasions. And in fact, it was their first batch, debuted at Dutchess Hop's Hoptember Festival last September (to great acclaim, I hear.) The exact hop bill changes from batch to batch, however, so come for the spirit of the beer, which is always excellent — it fits the mercurial, multi-faceted nature of the place. A fresh batch of this beer hit the taps on the day that I visited Bacchus, and drinking it throughout the day was a treat. I had not the slightest idea it clocked in at 10% ABV until two or three pints later — it drinks as light and refreshing as a well balanced IPA, focused on fruity tropical aromatics and dank citrusy depth over aggressive bitter intensity. Just how I like my IPAs.

Kamehameha - A fairly big and boozy Brett Trois IPA hopped aggressively with Falconer's Flight, then aged with Hawaiian Pineapples. My Scouter indicates that the Power Level of this beer is over 9000. I love to see more breweries doing Brett IPAs, and the pineapple addition was a smooth touch.

Et Cetera - 7% ABV farmhouse ale with a simple grain bill and a flexible second-life in barrels or on fruit. Some batches stick with just saison yeast, others have Brettanomyces added. According to the guys: "The idea is that it will always be an approachable, drinkable, dry and effervescent beer, but each batch will focus on different fruits, yeast, wood, etc." The version I had was aged on Cabernet grape skins from Whitecliff Vineyards in Gardiner, NY — twas tasty and unique.

Proletariat - A porter aged on Madagascar vanilla beans and locally roasted coffee from Mudd Puddle Cafe on Water Street.

Bourgeoisie - The same base beer as Proletariat, but aged on blood oranges and roasted hazelnuts. I haven't gotten to try either of these two porters, but this one especially sounds fascinating.

Luxuria - An imperial stout aged in whiskey barrels from Tuthilltown Distillery in Gardiner, then racked onto cherries.

Lilith - A dark sour ale fermented with wild yeast and local microflora and aged for one year in American oak barrels with raspberries. Mike and Jason were kind enough to open a bottle of this with me, and it really is a fascinating sour ale, creamy and roasty while still sporting a very tart acidity. There are very few breweries doing actual sours in New York, but Lilith doesn't taste like much else that I've had from any state.

Jason Synan contemplates while brewing, probably concluding that time is a flat circle.

Bacchus is brewing on a 3 barrel system right now, and with limited tank space, that's not a whole lot of beer for an established drinking spot without much local craft-beer competition. And therein lays the real reason few people outside of New Paltz have heard of this new brewery. Producing 6 bbls a week, Bacchus can't hope to brew enough beer to fill all 14 of their tap lines. Usually, only one tap at the bar is dedicated to Brewery at Bacchus beers, while the rest remain a rotating cast of other crafts. But even then — just one tap out of all the rest — each Bacchus beer tends to kick fast. According to Jason, who still manages the bar, it isn't unusual for them to go a couple days each week without any of their own beers on. 

In an out-of-the-way college town, with little promotion or regional attention, these guys can barely keep one line of beer from running dry. Pretty incredible. Frankly, I think their early success speaks volumes about the lingering mentality of brewers who think they "have to brew safe beer styles everyone is familiar with" or else people won't get it. 

It's not the 1990's anymore. Brew whatever you love. (As long as you brew whatever you love well). If you love blurring style boundaries, do that. If you love weird and funky beers, do that. There's no built-in market for sour beer or farmhouse Brett funk in New York, at least not yet. People just want to drink good beer.

And that, in my opinion, is what brewers tend to over-think. The average person has no clue what Brettanomyces is, and is more likely to be turned off by over-explanations than the actual flavor of a beer. You don't really need to share all the complicated background to them when you can just tell a curious customer: "this one really tastes like pineapple." Or, "the yeast and the oak create a wine-like character." Or, in the case of farmhouse ales: "it's tart and tropical." According to Jason, who spends most evenings behind the bar explaining beer to anyone curious, "Most people don't care about the specifics of how the beer is made. Beer geeks do, but not the average drinker. Most people just care how it tastes. The fermentation process and yeast strains might not interest them, but once I start explaining the different flavors in the beer, the fruit and stuff, then they're immediately interested."

By now, presumably, you're excited to pick up a few growlers of Bacchus beer for your next bottle share. Here's where the downside of the Brewery at Bacchus comes in — by necessity, there are no taster flights or growler fills just yet, and if you pick a day at random to visit, you may miss out on their beer altogether. As their goal for right now is simply to serve New Paltz, blending in with the locals at the bar over a couple weeks is probably the best way to get a sense of what these guys are doing. That town-bar dynamic could change soon, though, especially as more beer lovers realize that there is, in fact, a brewery hidden inside the sprawling Bacchus maze. Drinkers will be hanging out for the easy-drinking, high-impact IPAs and saisons, but the specialty batches lurking in barrels behind the scenes might eventually have them lining up.

Fortunately, Bacchus has plans for a 7 barrel brewery in a large, currently-unused space next door to the restaurant, and with a significant bump in equipment, it's easy enough to picture a full-fledged brewpub setup in another year.

It's too early to make any promises, but according to Mike, they're hoping to start the transition to the new space and new system sometime later in 2014. Still, the standard uncertainties apply. "It takes a long time to get all that together: the whole place has to be rebuilt and fitted with plumbing, electric, etc. Even when we move down there, we will still be working on our system for a while. But we will continue the same model of business. We will use our bright tanks to serve from and get more fermentors. So we should be able to have more beer, more consistency, as well as doing some growler fills."

The situation is such that it almost feels risky writing about these guys — not that my blog drives huge local traffic in the Hudson Valley, but with their beer limited as it is, it'll be awhile before Bacchus can stay comfortably ahead of demand. For those who don't live in the Hudson Valley, it's difficult to express just how much more success Bacchus could find if they simply become an established, regionally-popular destination. I know a lot of beer lovers, and outside of those that live in or very close to New Paltz, none were aware that Bacchus had installed a brewery. Or that they were making truly interesting beer. Their market, right now, is as local as it can get, and that's still not enough. But good breweries of this sort across the country rarely stay local for long.

How Not To Open a Brewery

Think about all the controversies in the brewing industry these last couple years — the buy-outs, the sell-outs, the lawsuits and copyright infringement, the huge vertical growth and breathless reports from those daring enough to stand before the dread 'Beer Bubble' and gaze into its noisome maw. In the wake of every controversy, a chorus can be heard to ring out: "Running a brewery is still a business!" The lesson learned: just because beer may be our passion, a brewer's passion, a successful brewery cannot exist without making profit, and therefore, breweries can and should be expected to act like proper businesses from time to time.

It's true. Breweries are certainly businesses, and few of them would survive without taking actions that are vaguely business-like in nature and in favor of their general fiscal benefit. (I might point out that an art gallery is a business too, but delving into that comparison is probably a tangent for another time.)

Brewing is a business — and the slight irony, in my opinion, is that the real passionate brewers, the ones that truly excel at making beer and tout their crazy love for it in everything they do, don't generally seem to have much trouble keeping the doors open (once they get them open.) No, it's the breweries that appear to be nakedly, purely business-ventures that I think are doomed.

New York is becoming an intriguing microcosm of the brewing world at large, a regional slice of an industry ignited by a sudden excitable gust of fresh air. For those paying attention, it's going to be like watching a hundred years of evolution progress at hyper-speed. So many breweries have been announced in the last year that I am still finding newcomers in my general region that somehow popped onto the scene without me noticing.

Maybe it is just me — being a pretentious beer-snobby hipster or something or other — but it seems discouragingly easy to spot which breweries are driven by the love of investment (by people who see it as a smart, fun venture in a hot market), and those which are driven by the love of beer (by people who are willing to take on a huge amount of risk for something they believe in). And while that oft-touted advice absolutely holds true — breweries are a business, not a hobby — I would put money on the passion-driven breweries in NY surviving. Some of the others? I don't think they'll exist in ten years.

How can I, a random schmuck from the internet, even begin to gauge other people's passions? Who am I to guess how these business-owners feel deep down inside? I don't know; I would only argue that when you're truly passionate about something, you can generally spot someone else that shares your symptoms. (For example, I can tell within five minutes of meeting someone how deeply they appreciate bears.) Positioning a gimmicky brand name above your beer — or making your beer itself seem like a gimmick — is a good way to raise my eyebrows.

Or, the example that inspired this whole rant. The other day I was leafing through a regional magazine of the sort that commonly sits in coffee-shops throughout the Hudson Valley. The very first thing, inside cover, full-page, was a vibrant advertisement for a local brewery. I recognized the location of the brewery but had no idea that any breweries existed there. So, the ad was a success — of course I am going to check this place out.

I head to Facebook, which confirmed that the brewery was brand new. No hours are listed. There is an "About" blurb with some marketing buzzwords about bringing good beer to the area and so-forth; the usual. "Ales and lagers." Okay. Well then. Nothing in the description that couldn't apply to almost any brewery in the country. Back on the feed, the brewery has posted links to some news articles about their development. Clicked on a couple, which said that the brewery was slated to open in summer 2013. Well, the magazine in which I had seen the advertisement was the winter 2013/2014 edition, so seemingly the place should be open by now, I reason, or else they would have given some kind of update alerting people to a major delay. Based on the various comments on the page asking general questions, it's weirdly hard to tell.

I click over to their website. There is nothing there but an unclickable image, their logo again. Not so much as an address. Huh.

One of the news articles includes some quotes from the guys opening the place. There are a couple of partners. None of them mentions any sort of background in brewing or awareness of beer outside of enjoying it, and realizing the area was lacking a brewery. One imagines they must have hired a brewer to work the equipment, but nothing is said of that. Beer is alluded to as an abstract concept, but never in detail. Now, it is absolutely possible to open a brewery without being the brewmaster yourself. In fact, there can be strong advantages to this scenario. But even in these situations, most people involved gush passion for beer, or at least spurt passion and defer to those who gush the rest of the time. One can tell if a brewery has a reason for being, because generally, the people who worked so hard to open the damn place will mention it. I understand that delays happen, contractors screw up your construction timeline, permits don't go through, and Facebooks get neglected. But if in all that time you can't be bothered to mention a single vague inkling of the beer you'll be offering, what's going to inspire someone to try it?

Unless what you're selling is simply: "a brewery." In which case: it'll have beer, it'll deliver alcohol to your body, who gives a shit? What are you, some kind of beer snob?

Now, this unnamed brewery in question might turn out to be one of the good guys, in the end. I don't know. Admittedly, the complete lack of any information or context makes it too hard to tell... which is of course the problem. Maybe something went horribly amiss during construction and they've been too busy to update their website with a beer list, or mention their hours. Maybe they placed that ad in the magazine months and months in advance, and after their brewery sank into a swamp, no one bothered to cancel it. It is entirely possible that their beer is, or will be, excellent. I would love to try it, but with all these warning signs, would you be willing to drive a few hours to find out? Well, not me, since I can't even tell whether the brewery is open.

I do think that there is a Beer Bubble. A number of breweries will not make it in the coming years. But I wonder who's going to miss the ones that go down first.

Is Craft Killing Big Beer — Not Through Sales, But Brand Status Erosion?

The last decade sure has provided journalists with some very reliable stories about the booze industry, hasn't it? Each year, the stories are pretty much the same, but since no one can quite unravel what's happening, the simultaneous growth and collapse of beer remains a fascinating economic case study.

In the last five years, craft beer has grown from 4.4 million to 7.3 million barrels produced (according to the Brewers Association), and so the story every year goes: craft shows no signs of slowing down, but maybe there'll be a bubble? Meanwhile, the big broad world of beer loses market share to wine and liquor. It makes for some interesting analysis: how is one small-but-broad niche growing so rapidly, while the over-arching industry crumbles? AdAge points to a number of culprits, everything from the economy to cold weather, but most analysis usually comes back to beer versus wine and liquor. After all, craft beer sales may rise dramatically, but still aren't a very big chunk of the overall market, whereas sales of liquor and wine together make for a massive economic juggernaut. According to Gallup, beer's lead over wine has slipped by 20 percentage points since the early 1990s.

I devised my own tentative theory a few days ago, when AdAge covered the recent National Beer Wholesalers Association annual meeting. I found a few paragraphs in that story to be very telling of the mindset of Big Beer marketers, so I'll just block quote them in full.

"At a private meeting with distributors, MillerCoors said it plans to meet that challenge with the 2014 launch of the high-end Miller Fortune, a higher-alcohol line extension. Ads will have the look and feel of liquor marketing, with messaging that "your fortune can change in an instant," according to a person at the meeting. 

But the most obvious way forward is to pay more attention to blue-collar consumers, the "most loyal drinkers of beer," MillerCoors CEO Tom Long said during a panel discussion. According to a person at the private meeting, the brewer plans to ramp up spending on Keystone Light and Miller High Life and return the brands to national TV.

While the industry has seen an explosion of brands and line extensions, Heineken USA CEO Dolf van den Brink said the pace of introductions "is not sustainable." Craft brands have flooded the market with new beers on an almost weekly basis. The activity is creating some fear that beer is becoming more like wine, in which styles are emphasized over branding. "There has to be a focus on building brands," said Bill Hackett, president of Crown Imports, whose brands include Corona."

The industrial complex has a deep-seated obsession with the concept of brands, and starting from this perspective, I think we can unravel some of the problems Big Beer is having. As the market changes, these companies just can't shake that mentality: we need premium brands, blue-collar brands; male and female-targeting brands; nostalgia brands; We must compete against "craft brands," and liquor and wine brand positioning. For every hole, there is a peg, for every consumer, there is a brand. Corporations have a very difficult time thinking any other way; understandably, as this approach has largely worked over the last hundred years. Beer has, traditionally, been driven by brands. And under this model, beer is sold much like cars, or computers, or any other industrial good. There is an economy brand, a medium-tier brand, an upscale brand, etc. The persistent attempts of macro breweries to convince people that "premium beer" is a specific type of beer is hilarious, and increasingly, kind of desperate.

But they are not exactly wrong. Many consumers do view the world, and alcohol, this way. Brands are a powerful thing. For a long time, the notion of "premium brands" was highly successful, as Big Beer was only really competing against itself, and night life establishments could position high end liquors and premium beers as roughly equivalent. Most people understand how beer works about as well as they understand how a car works, so if you keep insisting that a product is the "premium" version, they'll probably believe you. The branding model could establish its own rules, choose its own hierarchies. And for the marketers, it didn't really matter whether the "lite" category or the "premium" category was the most popular; they're all ultimately just brands.

But then craft beer came along, and, without even realizing or trying to do so, mucked up the whole hierarchy model. Sales of craft beer were insignificant at first — arguably, still are, in the general scheme of things — and nobody was really competing directly against the core brands of the big guys. But as consumers became increasingly aware of craft beer, something fundamental shifted. Craft brewers largely weren't marketing themselves, but nonetheless, managed to spread the general notion that they were making a better product. The use of "better ingredients" was often touted, even if consumers didn't have any direct interest in how beer was made. Craft beer was definitely more flavorful — even if you didn't like the flavor. Craft beer experimented, got nerdy, got technical, got obscure, got specific. Big Beer did not try to fight on this turf. Big Beer was satisfied to keep playing the "drinkability" card, the "lawnmower beer" card, the "you like to party, right bro?" card. And it did hit a few homeruns with "brands" that it never expected to sell — like Blue Moon — because they themselves did not fit into the traditional marketing approach. Blue Moon proved to be a massive success for Coors, but it was not the ultimate solution Big Beer needed. Because even though the majority of consumers are never going to show interest in Cantillon, or Hill Farmstead, or chase down a bottle of Kentucky Breakfast Stout, or trade for a case of Heady Topper, almost all consumers are now aware that craft beer exists. The world has conceded, perhaps begrudgingly, that beer crafted by small-scale, passionate artisans is probably the true high end. Many of these consumers do not themselves think craft beer is "better," in that they still prefer the taste of macro brews. But they are aware of the shift, the paradigm that now exists: craft beer is the "fancy" beer. The beer that aficionados and nerds and snobs drink.

And now, I would argue, a premium beer from the big guys doesn't quite equate to a top shelf liquor or wine. No matter how "into" beer you are, how could it? Fancy bars serve craft, townie bars serve macros. High end restaurants are still comically oblivious to the rise of pricey, profitable craft beer, but now a high end restaurant just looks ridiculous for serving a $6 Heineken alongside $80 bottles of obscure wine. So what happens then? A certain type of consumer switches to liquor and wine — maybe for status, maybe for the perceived value, maybe because, with beer shifting rapidly to a perplexing realm of un-marketed, obscure-sounding words-I-don't-understand, they feel that beer in general is lost to them. Wine has always been this way. Liquor has maintained a hierarchy that is easily understood. It becomes increasingly difficult to pretend that an expensive lager is a status symbol, so if you never were in love with the taste of it to begin with, why not order something else?

Obviously, beer marketers have not come to the same conclusion as me; or if they have, they are trying to realign their world through sheer perseverance. (And to be clear, my theory is certainly not the only factor, even if it's right. Many other trends, such as health claims and economics, shift the market share of these various drinks over time). Miller will make another grab for the premium beer market soon with Miller Fortune, following the lead of some recent introductions by Budweiser. Have these brands tanked, or will they? Nah. They still do fit into a branding slot that is decades old, and will appeal to a segment of the population; a segment that just happens to be dwindling rapidly. And thus, overall beer sales shrink, seeming to lose to the superior marketing efforts of high end liquor makers and the no-marketing-required, white-collar appeal of wine. Which then inspires Big Beer to copy the marketing techniques of high end liquor even more.

So Bill Hackett, president of Crown Imports, still worries: "There has to be a focus on building brands." But what happens when the notion of brands continues to erode, driven by a craft beer market that, like wine, pushes styles and regions and rating systems to the front of the conversation? We live in a world where, upon Googling for Budweiser's new Black Crown brand, the very first result is an influential review site that allows this premium beer a rather dismal 66 out of 100 rating. Most people may never glance at a word of those reviews, or care what they say, but this loud and immediate condemnation of quality can't be good for building luxury brand status.

How Does Beer Blogging Compare to Food and Wine Blogging?

If you want to really remind yourself how established an industry is, take a closer look at the people and publications writing about it. Mainstream publications have finally started covering our industry's meteoric rise from obscurity, and it's the ultimate success story, so why not? But dive a bit below the surface, into the seedy underworld of the intertubes, and you'll find thousands of beers blogs dotting the digital landscape, from the straightforward and barebones, to the utilitarian regional news sites, the gleaming professional mugshots of entrepreneurial craft commentators, and of course, the recipe-laden homebrew blogs.

Since starting bear-flavored.com over two years ago, I frequently find myself with basic blogging questions and concerns that I turn to the internet to answer. If you have spent any time Googling for basic blogging tips, you've probably noticed that the blog world seems to break down into a couple categories, with a few leaping hugely into the lead. Search for blog help, and you will likely find yourself at one of those weirdly-ghetto SEO-bait meta-blogging sites (blogs that exist purely to catch Google searches about blogs and turn traffic into ad revenue for their entrepreneurial owners), or a cooking blog, or a mommy blog (which is often also a cooking blog). The existence and massive popularity of food blogs makes a lot of sense, and we'll explore those comparisons more in depth. The existence and massive popularity of "mommy blogs" kind of blew my mind when I discovered how vast that rabbit hole went. I'll search for, say, help with a header question, and land on a sewing blog that gets 60,000 pageviews a day, with 14 million all time. Um, okay. Not bad.

Turns out, women dominate the blogging world. "A Pew Research Center study found there are around 34.9 million bloggers total; 18.9 million women and 16 million men. The study showed that although many men have been able to earn money from blogging, they 'haven't been as aggressive or profitable as their women counterparts in generating financial support from brands'" [source]. So let's see: does this play out in the community of beer blogs, as well?

Now, to be clear, not every food blog or lifestyle blog nets huge traffic. Cooking as a blog theme is a topic with much broader audience potential. (Though I'm not sure about sewing... seems like that would be roughly equivalent to homebrewing in this day and age). Cooking has been popular for, oh, at least a few decades, whereas homebrewing only really gained widespread acceptance in the last ten to twenty years. Homebrewing is a decidedly smaller niche than those who cook their own meals, and a subject which is inherently less economical to blog about, as brewing beer takes more time, effort, equipment, and knowledge than assembling an arugula beet salad. (And I mean no disrespect to arugula beet salads).

At first, this would lead me to suppose that homebrew blogging will never be quite as popular as cooking blogs (though general beer commentary blogs would seem to have a higher upper-ceiling). Still, I have long been curious if beer is simply a niche that will continue to grow, that will see closer, more organized networks bring structure, awareness, maybe even revenue or media potential. Food bloggers and mommy bloggers are very organized in their approach — at least the big ones — with ad networks, content sharing programs, buttons, webinars, pay-to-download instructions, recipe sharing parties, and all sorts of social media tricks I'd never heard of before.

Which makes me wonder: what will beer blogging look like in another ten years?

Fortunately, there exists an annual Beer Bloggers Conference, organized by Zephyr Adventures, who also fielded a "State of Beer Blogging" survey as well as a "Lifestyle Blogging Report," which included beer blogging as a subset. These two reports are full of comprehensive graphs and analysis, which will be the basis for my own insights, below. Many thanks to Zephyr Adventures and the Beer Bloggers Conference for helping to organize these nascent communities, and shed some light on what we're all doing. I had never heard of the Beer Bloggers Conference before this year, when it suddenly exploded onto my Twitter feed, but I would love to attend next year. For now, let's see what we can learn about the state (and future state) of beer blogging based upon the BBC's excellent research. I recommend also checking out the reports in their original form, as I will only be interpreting some of the findings here, not regurgitating them in full.

Gender

beer blog survey

The Report finds that over 80% of beer bloggers are male, an overwhelming discrepancy from the world of general blogging. Food blogs and fitness blogs are almost the polar opposite. On some scale, this seems to mirror the beer industry itself. I have never really understood why craft beer largely trends toward white males, but it does, and hopefully we'll see some diversity emerge in the coming decade as brewing beer transforms from "niche hobby for people with beards" to simply "hobby" — analogous to cooking, done for both practicality and passion, and open to anyone.

Above is a screenshot of the demographics for the 230 people who "Like" Bear Flavored Ales' Facebook page at the time of this writing. The break-down is roughly three quarters male and one quarter female, which is at least slightly better than the general overall figure for beer bloggers. (Of note, too, Facebook suggests that it is weighted toward males in the first place). However, in my experience, actual engagement may play out a bit different. I honestly cannot recall receiving very many comments to my blog from female readers. Of course, some comments are left anonymously, or with gender-unspecific usernames. But of those with a name given, every one that I can recall has been male.

Motivations for Blogging
Most beer bloggers do not get into beer blogging in the hopes of making money off of their actual blog. To quote from the report: "Passion for beer is by far the most motivating factor driving beer bloggers. Most bloggers do what they do simply because they love good beer. 30.4% hope to turn their blog into a job and only 8.9% who hope to monetize their blog, which is a realistic message many Beer Bloggers Conference attendees have heard over the years: bloggers are not likely to monetize their blog but are likely to gain skills and a reputation that are directly transferable to the beer industry."

While jobs in the beer industry are not exactly abundant, this makes a lot of sense. A low level job in the beer industry may be perceived as a lot more interesting — and allow for much more upward mobility — than a low level job in, for instance, a restaurant. However, as food is a much more universal subject, a blog can rake in many pageviews through smart SEO and pretty pictures, and thus lead to a fair bit of ad revenue. Beer bloggers may not see their blog as not having the potential to be anything greater in and of itself, while it's commonly known that there are "professional" food bloggers that earn a living from their blogging.

Type of Blog Content

beer blog survey

Interestingly, "brewing beer" doesn't seem to have been included as a potential subject here. Not sure what's up with that, but since I also do beer reviews, I guess Bear Flavored passes. A lot of beer writing at the moment seems to boil down to "I went on a road trip and visited these breweries," where the trick is making it as fun and insightful for the reader as it theoretically was for the writer. The problem with beer writing in general, however, is that most possible angles you could take are highly regional, if not local, thus inherently limiting their appeal. I wonder if this is part of the reason beer blogging has not seen the explosive success of some other blogging fields — often, we're writing for a niche within a niche. 

Social Media

beer blog survey

The BBC report seems to jive with my own experience that Facebook and Twitter are the largest drivers of traffic to the blog, while no one understands what to do with Google+. However, I will add that I receive a significant share of traffic simply from Google referrals, and SEO thus seems to be hugely important, so maybe G+ is just important in different ways.

Traffic

Here we have more evidence that food blogs kind of crush the nascent beer blogging community in traffic — though, interestingly, all the charts in the Lifestyle Report have wine blogs about on the same level as beer, though one might assume wine to be more established and accepted than craft beer. (Perhaps this is equalized by beer's "zeitgeist.") You will notice, however, that the median number of visitors is fairly close on all blog 'types', suggesting that the majority of blogs will receive similar levels of traffic regardless of niche, while food blogs have the highest ceiling for potential visitors. A beer or wine blog may be reasonably successful, while a food blogs may be exponentially successful. According to the report, there were food blogs reporting one million, three million, and eight million visitors per month within the survey responses. Eight million visitors per month! Anyone wanna bet that's more than every homebrewing blog combined?


Since I did not participate in this survey, but I am using their stats and talking about everyone else's numbers, I feel it would be kind of evasive if I did not include some figures from my own blog. In the month of August, Bear Flavored had about 6,400 unique visitors, which is apparently a little above average for beer and wine industry blogs, though would be quite low on the charts as far as food blogs go. These unique visitors translated to between 18,000 and 20,000 pageviews (Blogger and Google Analytics give different figures, despite both being platforms run by Google, which seems... odd). Pageviews have been on a steady climb basically every month since I started the blog, so for the first year, I was seeing only a handful of pageviews a day. I'm interested (and anxious!) to see if this trend continues over the next year.

$$$Money$$$

Blogging about beer is not very lucrative, which... no surprise there. If you read enough about blogging in general, you'll see tons of debate as to whether blogging is a practical means to support a career at all. Clearly, some people are doing it, and they're the ones pulling in truly insane pageview figures. Most bloggers can expect perhaps a modest monthly supplement to their income, but it's clearly not something one should pursue for monetary reasons. Fortunately, according to the survey, most beer bloggers don't — passion for beer is the primary motivation for starting a blog. When I started Bear Flavored two years ago, I didn't really have any motivation or expectations beyond that. I've always written about something or other in my free time, and as my obsession with beer grew, it just made sense to have that be the thing I was writing about.

Still, it's interesting that so few beer bloggers seem to be making any money via blogging. While every other lifestyle blog genre surveyed show that about 11 - 15% of its bloggers make between $200 - $2000 a month blogging, it's telling that only 5% of beer bloggers make over $200 a month, at all. Homebrewers (and this is just my observation) largely seem content to run a "sharing recipes"-focused blog, post when they can, and do so out of passion. However, I've always wondered about more "general" beer blogs that cover news, events and industry discussion. According to the survey, "Of those who do make some money from their blogs, the most successful method for beer, wine, and food writers is obtaining paid writing gigs. Consulting on social media or within the industry is also somewhat successful." Still not entirely clear, but there's always that "becoming a voice within the industry," bit, which I'm sure has some intangible, non-monetary perks.

As of writing this, I have never made any money off of Bear Flavored, though from time to time (whenever I see traffic spikes, I guess) I've thought about introducing a few unobtrusive advertisements.  Google AdSense apparently isn't allowed on pages dealing with alcohol (they rejected me on this basis, at least) but there are smallish ad networks that would probably offer more relevant, interesting material anyway. I hate pages that are cluttered and visually over-whelmed by ads, but I think it's possible to incorporate just enough to still make something back respective to your time investment. Blogging on a regular schedule is a lot of work, and can often feel like a freelance job as well as a passion-project.

I wonder how other bloggers, and readers, feel about these things. Do you hate ads? Do you just set up an ad blocker so you never see them? (I assume lots of people do this). Do you think there's a point where a blogger is daft to not make a few bucks from their blog, once the pageviews justify it? While the stats, and the general consensus from other blogs I've read, seems to suggest that any income from an average blog would only maybe just pay for the cost of one batch's ingredients, that still seems like a pretty good tradeoff.

I'm generally curious to hear what people think, so please feel free to comment below. Will food blogs and beer blogs one day be yin and yang? Or does beer simply not have the spontaneity that makes recipe-hunting for dinner such a universal, and potentially lucrative, activity?