Skip to main content

Craft beer embraces quality over quantity

There are few, if any, industries outside of brewing where a large company will protect a potential competitor's trademark, return it to them for free and encourage them to take advantage of the resurgent market and get back to work. That's what happened with Samuel Adams and New Albion Brewery a few years ago (New Albion is back in production after being closed 30 years). Founded as a craft brewery in 1976, New Albion helped kick-start the craft brew revolution, but couldn't grow and closed just five years later. Sam Adams' owner, Jim Koch, dug the beer so much he bought the brand and the recipe and did his own spinoff with former New Albion owner Jack McAuliffe. When the beer was a success at the 2012 American Beer Festival, Koch did what any business person would do, he returned the brand to the founder and said, "Get back in the game."
Seriously.
If a movie ended like that it would be trite. If you're not familiar with the New Albion Ale story, this is a more detailed summary, and this is an even more detailed one.
There are a thousand possible reasons Koch returned the brand (which is back in distribution), but the one that is the most elegant gets to the heart of the craft and homebrew movement: Brewing now is about the beer and nothing else. This is how the new beer barons, such as they are, are likely to operate. Koch purchased the brand just to keep it out of a megabrewery's hands and returned it to McAuliffe's daughter at the height of the craft beer boom.

The trend that brewers have identified, and that many other industries are slowly coming to recognize is Americans are moving toward a less stuff, better stuff mentality. By the late1800s, everyone was impressed with how plentiful America was and how efficiently machines made our world run. We could make lots of stuff, and make it inexpensively, and ship it all over the country ate increasingly record speeds. Budweiser, although it seems silly to say now, succeeded because it could make the most, best beer. According to some historians, the race to constantly tweak the brewing process, to make more for less, occupied the better part of human history. The megabreweries were the logical result of that race. It is only recently we have begun to consider whether this was a race worth winning.
McAuliffe was among the handful of people who thought it would be a worthwhile project to wrest the craft of brewing from the mechanics of it. Koch was another one. So was, Sam Calagione. As intrigued as the 19th century beer barons were by the possibility of being able to sell beer to everyone, the new beer barons are captivated by the notion of elevating the beverage's world wide palate appeal. But, more than that, it is as if they seek to draw a line between those who emphasize the former over the latter.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searching Philadelphia for Maryland Beer

The Van Pelt library at the University of Pennsylvania truly is the type you can get lost in. I know 'cause I did. Early in my research I discovered that there was a person named John Beale Bordley, who was a colonial hotshot and one of the first production-scale brewers in Maryland. Bordley was friendly with Thomas Jefferson and as concerned as he was about what we now call sustainable living. Part of that, for Bordley, was not having to rely upon the British for ale. After reading his book online and fumbling across some of his papers, it became clear to me that it might just be possible to find his recipe. Finding the first Eastern Shore beer recipe and including it in my book , would be a massive coup. I had to head to Philly to have my computer repaired. The best way to have your Mac die, it turns out, is to get behind on your writing schedule and then engage on a wild goose chase. The Apple people took it from me and sent it off to have the hard drive replaced. I thanked ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Away we go

In a very, very technical sense, this was the first photo taken for the book. When  +The History Press  agreed to publish my book , I was a little worried about getting the right photos. But not quite as worried as they were at first. You see, Eastern Shore Beer was to be a pretty book, as well as an informative one. I got something like 32 color pages for a photo insert and was responsible for the cover and back cover art. When they asked if I thought I could get photos I said, "Kind of." There were three problems as I saw it. First of all, beer hasn't been all that well-documented on the Eastern Shore. Certainly, it hasn't been treasured until recently, so the archives that aren't bare, aren't well marked. Secondly, there weren't the kinds of high-profile prohibition busts in the 20s as there were in metropolitan areas, therefore there were no photos of colorful characters in bowlers smirking for the camera after destroying a beer barrel.
Post a Comment
Read more

Beer makes great copy

Sure. Like you don't have a beer writing hat. When I was a reporter, and then when I was an editor, publishers would give me a hard time if I wrote too many brewery stories. I understood where they were coming from, but there were (and still are) few small-town business stories as compelling. The story about small batch breweries has always been a double-trend story. Opening and hiring people was bucking the employment and economic development trend of the time (2008-2012). Plus, there was the larger, new micro-brew revolution trend. Beyond the fact that the story was compelling was the fact that it included beer. No one believes spending an hour or so at the brewery counts as taking one for the team. It's funny but at the time I never considered how widespread that phenomenon was.  I wrote for a small paper in a small town. There were millions of guys like me, educated but barely employable in any other industry. We were all gravitating toward the local beer s...
Post a Comment
Read more