The Session #130: Create Your Own Beerfest

Posted on December 1, 2017 by Brian Yaeger

3664495894_75dbf1b0bf_m Well this is fun. Writing my own entry for The Session that I’m hosting/foisting on my fellow beer bloggers. The self-imposed assignment is to write about how (I) would design (my) dream beer festival. Conceptually, I tried to take all the major facets into account: theme, beer style(s), location, attendance, ticket pricing, and my overarching-ampersand that affects the way I think about enjoying beer, writing about beer, and celebrating beer, “and,” as in “beer and.” In other words, this is a festival for beer and what-else?

The level of self-interest in this ain’t veiled. I actually throw a few beer festivals back in Portland where I got to live from 2010 to the summer of 2017. And I may take a stab at one here in SoCal (since beerfests and sun go snifter-in-hand). My first baby is Baker’s Dozen in which I invite a baker’s dozen worth of breweries to make a coffee beer using 13 roasters’ beans and attendees also get samples from 13 doughnuteries (the 4th annual fest will be March 11, 2018). There’s Kriekfest, a celebration of Belgian Kriek-inspired beers or imports from Belgium that takes place in the Columbia River Gorge surrounded by Oregon cherry orchards (mark your calendars for July 21, 2018). For a couple years I had a hoot doing The Rural Brewer, inspired both by visiting all the tiny Oregon breweries in tiny towns far from the greater beer map as well as the running gag in 30 Rock about an off-broadway musical, The Rural Juror. And, what started as and really should’ve remained just a fun what-if exercise in beerfest tomfoolery, City of Goses. (Because beer puns.)

What these tell me is that I clearly love niche beer festivals. And that, both by design in the fact that sales are capped and never would’ve sold far beyond that cap (500), I prefer settings that are cozier. It’s what the Dutch call gezellig. That was my pitch to Portland’s moribund Bazi Bierbrasserie in launching Gluhbier Night—an intimate affair of warm, mulled beers that are a way of life at European Christmas markets (along with the infinitely more popular gluhwein). Beer fests, to me, are like the perfect concerts. It’s not that I’ve never attended stadium concerts (Rolling Stones. Eric Clapton. Even Michael Jackson at Dodger Stadium supporting Thriller!). And it’s not that I don’t love OBF and GABF with their thousands and thousands of revelers. But when you’re at a smaller venue, you feel a sense of camaraderie and anyone there might become your new beer drinking buddy. I’m still friends with someone I met a decade ago at a blues and brews fest, highlighting the power of both beer and music. So for me, when the number of attendees stretches out into the triple digits but not the fours, I think you’re really mashing with steam.

Style-wise, there’s absolutely something to be said for a fest where you get to enjoy as wide a range of styles as brewers can conceive. My palate doesn’t mind bouncing around from bitter IPA to boozy BBA behemoth to puckering lambic-style and then mellow out with an approachable Continental lager. But my dream beer fest doesn’t peddle in that kind of cerveza schizophrenia. I do relish IPAs, stouts, and barrel-aged beers, but there’s no shortage of IPA fests (and IIPA and IIIPA) or dark beer fests or wood-aged ones. I’m not interested in recreating an event that’s been done before. Clearly, I really love coffee beers. And my favorite fruited beers really are cherry ones (sorry Framboise-o-philes, I rarely share your raspberry romance). One beer fest I loved conceptually was Mighty Mites, conceived and curated by session beer statesman Jeff Alworth. Nothing over 4% ABV! Imagine a fest where you can truly sample every beer and walk out on your own accord. It occurred once and then Bazi continued a watered down (I see what I did there) version of it as part of the Hawthorn Street Fair. I also was enamored with Portland Mercury’s Malt Ball, wherein Portland brewers and bands truly sat down and created a beer designed to pair with the band’s sound. They never pulled it off perfectly, but the concept was divine. So for this imaginary fest I’m scheming up, one thing I’m currently crushing on is herbal beers. (Sage beers, anyone?!) Saisons infused with Basil or thyme supplement my love of hops. This is very much in the domain of Beers Made By Walking.

herbgarden As for my “beer and” thoughts above, since every festival is essentially a giant beer garden, naturally this one would have a giant herb garden. Picture a farmer’s market meets cooking demonstration where you get to learn about ways to use these various herbs: homemade tinctures, remedies, growing tips, and more. Keep in mind I can hardly grow a bed of mint so this is something I could really use.

As for the twin elements of festival location and region the participating breweries hail from, which I cushioned as “locavore vs. globetrotter,” I’m torn on this. Much like the best beer is, theoretically, the one in my hands, the best beer fest is the one closest to me. But in reality, neither is always or frequently true. I’ve seen some beer events championing smoked beers, and I have no clue if this is a thing, but if someone held a Rauchbierfest in Bamberg, I’d be part of that zeitgeist. Still, I’d like to see the best of smoke from breweries in and beyond Franconia. I’m still kicking myself for not getting to Night of Great Thirst, Belgium’s lambicfest, when we lived in neighboring Holland. And even that now includes great representations from breweries as far afield as the USA. So my mythical Herbal Beer Fest for anywhere from 500-999 beer fans is to be held in a gnome’s garden or a færie’s forest. And I want creatures from all around to fly or burrow their way in.

Incidentally, one of the items I put forward to participants for this exercise is to come up with the price of admission. This is something I completely struggle with IRL. As the events organizer, I confess I’d like to make money off of them. As someone who attends way more beer fests than I put on, I like to not spend a ton. I’m convinced that my events are a great value, based on how little I’ve ever made off of them. Maybe I should bring in sponsors. Maybe I should charge more. One thing I’ll never do is offer a VIP session. Unlike, say, flying somewhere where the passengers have nothing in common except a destination, concert goers and festival attendees are in it together. They should be communal and therefore egalitarian. (By way of confession, when I accept media passes to a beerfest, they sometimes include the perks of VIP admission. Perhaps that’s hypocritical, but I’d never pay extra to feel entitled to MORE of the beerfest than my anyone else. Also, I never use all my media tokens and end up sharing them with strangers.) So I don’t like to give anyone special privileges just because they could pay more than the hoi polloi. Maybe that’s just me and maybe I’m leaving money on the table as a result.

Now, am I really going to put on this beerfest? No. Well, never say never. Like I said, I do want to create something here in SoCal that we don’t already have. And despite the bi-annual release of the Stone Brewing collab saison featuring parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, I don’t believe there’s any event just for herbal beers. If anyone reading this wants to partner, you know where to find me. But first, gut check: would you buy a ticket?

Announcing The Session #130 – Create Your Own Beerfest

Posted on November 8, 2017 by Brian Yaeger

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T he Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is our–the global beer blogging community’s–monthly get-together to write from our own respective perspectives on a single topic (of the monthly host’s choosing, which for December, 2017 means me). Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry. The series was created and is organized by the duo of Stan Hieronymus and Jay R. Brooks, and more information can be found on the latter’s site.

I’m honored to be hosting for the second time, first back in 2009, and not unexpectedly have landed on a topic near’n’dear to my heart: beerfests. Your mission, should you choose to accept it (and please, as someone who’s come back to The Session fold, I’m pushing to get 20+ fellow beer bloggers to participate in December, and onward) is to write about how you would design your dream beer festival. Posts are due Friday, December 1.

There are actually so many regional, local, and niche beer fests these days, we’re hearing a bit about “beerfest fatigue.” And I get that. Can you really hit 52 of ’em a year if you live somewhere near Portland, San Diego, Denver, Chicago, Philly, NYC, etc? As someone who attends more than my fair share, sadly not all are created equal, but one I may not care for is probably someone else’s annual favorite. Things to ponder:

Size matters: When building your own fest, are you striving for a crowd of Oktoberfest proportions in the millions, an epic party of many thousands, or more intimate few hundred?
Styles matter: From GABF where over 7,900 beers across every imaginable style (and mash-up) were available for sampling to themed events such as barrel-aged beers or holiday ales, to the plethora of IPA fests and some other single-style fests, would the event of your design be a grab-bag or exhibit razor-sharp focus?
Locavore vs Globe Trotter: After deciding what kind of beers to feature, or even before, think about if you’re inviting your local breweries or ones from your Brewery Fantasy League. Are attendees going to be more tempted to support local or to get a taste of beers from breweries they don’t already have access to? Let’s put aside for a second how hard it can be to bring in a brewery that’s not already licensed to distribute in your home town if that’s where this event is.
Location, location, and timing: The most important element of a successful event is its location. Followed by location. Followed by timing. When and where is this fantasy beerfest of yours? Is it in a city rife with events (meaning they’ve proven to be popular) or one starved for such a fest (but who’s to say if the locals will support)? And does it take place in the summer at the height of beer drinking season or a less-crowded date where it can shine on its own?
Etcetera. There’s a lot more that goes into organizing a beer fest. (I know from experience in producing some that have turned into annual events and some I’ve let slip away as a one- or two-off.) So if you want to opine about your favorite kind of glassware (or hated glasses you always see), ticket prices, food vendors, or anything else that you hate witnessing or wonder why we don’t see something like we should, add that, too. Finally, end with a note about why you can see trying to make this fantasy fest a reality or why you’ll never advance this idea of yours beyond the Session post!

Thanks for participating. Again, please post your blog in the comments below by or on Friday, Dec. 1. Or you can tag me @yaeger when you post on Twitter.

The Session #129: Missing Beer Styles

Posted on November 6, 2017 by Brian Yaeger

session Before I even jump into the 129th entry in the decade-long running Beer Blogging Session, I’m happy to announce that Yours Truly will be hosting the 130th rendition of The Session! I won’t hijack my own post and spill the beans what the topic will be (stay tuned for my announcement next week), so now I can resume tackling this month’s subject as conjured up by Eoghan Walsh and hosted at his Brussels Beer City is: Missing Local Beer Styles.

In 2017 it might seem odd to think that there are beer styles missing from our local markets. We seem to be living in an era of almost ubiquitous choice – where almost every style of beer is available to us either in bars or online, and where new styles quickly break out from their local markets to be brewed by craft or independent breweries around the world. Often though, this choice feels like one between an IPA, a session IPA, a double IPA, a NEIPA, a black IPA (although, really?), West Coast IPA, fruited IPA, etc.

You get the picture.

Outside of large metropolitan areas, areas with a large craft beer culture, or regions without recourse to online shopping the spread of different or new styles can remain limited. …(As such) what beer style would you like to see being brewed in your local market that is not yet being brewed?

Posed this question one month ago, I’d have had a hard time delivering an answer. The only beer style that it seems my local or most of America’s craft breweries completely ignore of late is the English IPA (*rimshot*). But there, on the floor of this year’s GABF, Austin’s Live Oak Brewing was sampling attendees with a smoky motif: a 4.4% Heller Rauchbier, a whopper, jr. of a 3% Grodzinskie, and—voila—what I recall was my first taste of a Lichtenhainer. If you caught yourself reaction with “a what-en-heinie?!” you’re excused for never having heard of it before. In a few words, it’s a smoked German sour ale. In more than a few words, here’s Live Oak’s description from their webpage outlining their brilliant line of six rauchbiers:

Lichtenhaier is a German beer style that vanished in the 1980s. Similar in strength and tartness to Berliner Weisse, this beer adds the intriguing aroma of smoked malt. Fermentation with yeast and Lactobacillus creates an acidic profile. The low bitterness and high level of carbonation allows for full enjoyment of the subtle lemony acid and smoke flavors. Please enjoy this historical re-recreation. OG 9ºP, ABV 3.2%, IBU: 6

Now, I love me some thick, bone-toasting Aecht Schlenkerla Doppelbock at 8% or their 6.4% Hellerbock, each robust with bacony goodness that leaves me reeking as if I’ve stumbled into a bonfire, this Lichtenhainer was still big on smoke, medium on tartness, making it huge on flavor yet a featherweight in both body and alcohol. In other words: a perfect beer! And yet, the only time I’d ever come across the style name was general passages lumping German sour ales together such as goses and gratzers. As was to be expected, I found an entry about them on Shut Up About Barclay Perkins (and much of the good stuff is Ron Pattinson (mis-credited as Martyn Cornell initially because of a spirited sandwich feud taking place on Jay Brooks’s Facebook wall that gave me Martyn-on-the-brain) quoting vintage publications, beginning with this quote from Dr. Max Delbrück’s Brauerei-Lexicon of 1910:

“Lichtenhainer is made from smoked barley malt alone, it acquires its sourish taste not during primary fermentation, as does Berliner Weisse, but only through a later developing infection with lactic acid bacteria. . . .”

As for its appellation, Pattinson notes where Lichtenhainer hails or hailed from:

“Real” Lichtenahainer came from the villages of Wöllnitz, Ziegenhain, Ammerbach, Winzerla and, of course, Lichtenhain.

One thing I personally find interesting is that Lichtenhein, a village in Saxony, is exactly 330 kilometers southeast of Goslar where un-smoked goses emanated and 330 km northeast of Bamberg where non-soured rauchbiers have never gone extinct.

*Update* It only took Ron a few hours to not only see my post but make a few amendments. Not quite corrections as I don’t believe I got anything wrong, per se, about Lichtenhainer’s disapperance, but I’m sure Pattinson would like everyone to be aware that “Berliner Weisse was also smoked until the 1840’s. Grätzer/Grodziskie was never a sour style” and furthermore that “Lichtenhainer only disappeared for a few years.” I will say that, if it only disappeared for a few years, even people who were declared dead and then get their pulse back seconds or minutes later get to claim they were legally dead.

So there we have it. I don’t have much more to extrapolate after that, but I’m glad that I had an answer for this month’s Session and I’m glad the Session gave me an outlet to praise effusively Live Oak’s rendition of a Lichtenhainer as well as add another global destination on my bucketlist to hunt down an authentic iteration. Then again, if more breweries (that I have access to far from Texas) start giving a lick, I would only have to make the journey to my local watering hole.

The Session #127: Bottle Shops

Posted on October 5, 2017 by Brian Yaeger

session So the 127th topic for The Session is, if you’ll pardon the crude analogies, akin to asking Cheech & Chong about what makes a great head shop or the late Hugh Hefner which campuses to scour for Playmates. Let’s let Jack Perdue over at Deep Beer set it up:

The theme chosen is Bottle Shops: Good, Bad & The Ugly. I find bottle shops interesting and would like to learn other perspectives on these places many of us purchase our favorite quaffs. We love our beer and have a variety of options in acquiring it. Some home brew, others like to visit their local pubs, beer tourism and beer destinations have become a trend, but the ever popular bottle shop is often the best and most reliable means for finding our next beer.

Of course, not all bottle shops are the same.

As a greenhorn, I first dipped my toes into the malted waters in the megachain BevMo. In those days, though, the modern bottle shop scarcely existed since craft beer was on the uptick and wax-dipped, corked’n’caged, coolship-fermented, foeder-aged beers had yet to dominate the glassy knolls of today’s beer geek Meccas.

From witnessing firsthand the birth of San Francisco’s revered City Beer Store where Craig & Beth curated exceptional coolers and shelves full of whalez bait and across town where Eric Cripe once converted The Jug Shop into the bomber bastion of the Bay to my most recent local retailer, the world-famous Belmont Station now helmed by Lisa Morrison, bottle shops have long served as my social hub, ear to the tracks, and source of retail therapy. I dare confess they’ve alleviated any chance my bank account has had of ever appearing bloated.

Furthermore, some of my best memories on the Open Beer Road have included the time I spent hours at Goebel Liquor talking to Rob Miller, III about his “World of Beer” where he sold self-cellared carriers of Celebration verticals and was grooming his son, Rob, IV, to manage the store where they’ve stopped counting after the 1,700th SKU. That was in Wichita, KS and I had an even more memorable–or forgetful–night in Bowling Green, KY where Blake Layne tapped for me the keg of Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout he’d been hording at Chuck’s. It was also the first time I’d enjoyed Brooklyn Black Ops RIS. And several more which I can’t detail since the night ended with me checking into a room at the hotel across the road.

Bottle shops are great because–besides the obvious, which is that it’s where you go to buy good beer and get recommendations from the employees who ought to be the most credible, local experts–they’re the closest beer lovers have to treasure chests. In lieu of gold dobloons and strings of pearls, you are rewarded with shelf after shelf of bourbon-aged stouts and fruit-forward sour ales; Bohemian pilsners, German pilsners, dry-hopped pilsners, and silly imperial or black or yuzu pilsners abound. But what about the buried treasure? One of the most fun things you can do at a huge bottle shop, especially one that’s in a less populated town or even in the less trendy neighborhoods, is getting down on your hands and knees and moving bottles around to rifle through dusty, forgotten and forlorn bottles in the back that less eagle-eyed whale hunters have missed. Once, when The Bruery’s Four Calling Birds came out, I happened upon a Partridge in a Pear Tree. And long after Deschutes’s Brandy-aged The Abyss had been snatched up by the devil’s share, I received the angel’s.

I shop less at these places today than I used to (this blogger tells himself as he’s en route to Denver where he knows he’ll stop into Mr. B’s near his Airbnb pad and scour the coolers and aisles searching for American krieks, maybe a beloved CONE-IPA [that’s not an IPA made with hop cones but Colo-brewed New England-style], and even though he only buys beers from the state he’s in, he’ll make an exception if he finds anything from Missouri’s Scratch Brewing like he did last year). Partly because with a kid, I have less time for shopping as well as hosting bottle parties. But also hugely because I did so much that my cellar overfloweth and I’m on hiatus until I can drink it down to clear some room. And that’s after our recent move which necessitated depleting the stash by a solid 20%. But like I said up front, no matter how crudely, somewhere between being an addict and a connoisseur lies the layer many of today’s beer consumers and the place we get our fix or strike gold is down at the bottle shop.

The Session #126: Hazy, Cloudy, Juice IPAs

Posted on August 8, 2017 by Brian Yaeger

session When I first started beer blogging, I was an avid Sessioner. Alack, I’ve been remiss of late and see that I participated once a year since 2013. That ends now. I’m recommitting myself (even if a few days late). And happily that means jumping back in as my friends Gail Williams and Steve Shapiro up at Beer By BART ask us to sniff on this:

(The) still-emerging – though no longer new – unofficial beer style. This kind of beer has gotten so much buzz (and some mocking) in the last decade and a half that it’s surprising it has not come up on The Session yet. New England, Vermont-inspired, Northeastern, Hazy, Juicy or whatever you like to call these low-bitterness, hop flavorful beers, they are being made everywhere now and people are definitely buying them. So fire up your keyboard – let’s hear about your own encounters with these strange IPAs.

I like beer, all kinds of it in fact. And I certainly care more about the end result—its overall pleasantness as a factor of aroma, texture, and flavor—than I do about what style the brewer calls it or if it’s the “right” beer to be drinking either in terms of popularity or seasonal appropriateness. As such, when half the beer lovers I know are enamored of New England IPAs and the other half abhor the idea of opaque IPAs, I guess I’m firmly in the camp of take it or leave it.

I do faintly recall my first Heady Topper. It garnered a live-action Meh emoji. At the time, living in close proximity to Russian River and ergo fresh Pliny the Elder, I just figured the can I’d been handed (unsure how long it had been in transit) was the East Coast’s best stab at a bold IPA. It didn’t pop the way PtE does. Maybe I’d have dubbed it Pliny the Middle-aged. By the time I had it a second time, I was actually in the state of Vermont where the can at the Burlington airport failed to meet the tastiness of even the other Vermont-style IPAs I’d naturally sampled at breweries like Prohibition Pig (established in the same space where the Alchemist Pub suffered its fateful flood), FOAM, and one a bit less off the hype-grid, 14^th Star Brewing up in St. Alban (where Verizon charged me as if I was in Quebec because it’s so close to the border). Their B-72 Double IPA, I got the sense, was brewed begrudgingly for tourists clamoring for this marketing terroir, but it really was hazy/juicy/smooth and I’d happily drink it again if I’m in Vermont. Because when in Rome.

There are signs NEIPA is in full-fledged fad mode, and it’s fast-tracking all the fads IPA itself has gone through. We’ve seen NEB(lack)IPA (or as I’d prefer to call it: a New England Cascadian Dark Ale—a hilarious oxymoron given that it’s both New England and Pacific Northwest in origin and would probably be brewed out of the Midwest). Oh, and we’ve seen the Citrus-infused NECDA!

An afternoon visit to M Special Brewing in Goleta, CA. What’s in that snifter above?

Oh, and speaking of NEIPAs from Cascadia, back in Portland—which I already miss greatly—the first brewery to jump on the Vermont wagon was Great Notion Brewing. Their Juice Box (8.2%) and Juice, Jr. (6%) set the tone for PDX’s race to out-NE everyone, wherein even early poo-pooers are now hazing to the max. Among Great Notion’s litany of beers with the word “Ripe” in the name and “New England” in the description, there was one called Orange Creamsicle IPA. I’d never had Tree House’s infamous Julius—nor have I had it yet—but my first sip of Orange Creamsicle, made with both orange and vanilla flavors—instantly brought me back to my childhood spent at Orange Julius. And I think that’s why some adult beer drinkers slag these adult-beverages that sorta-somehwat appeal to more juvenile palates. They are fruity and juicy and sweet and, well, nostalgic. But hey, it’s not like the industry doesn’t have its share of famous beers that famously taste like Mexican chocolate cake or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups or Cinnamon Toast Crunch, so there’s no reason to get sanctimonious about what other people enjoy in their glass of beer.

All kidding or ribbing aside, I just enjoyed a few beers at one of my new local breweries, M Special in Goleta, where I got a beer they honestly dubbed an NEIPL. And you all remember how much you scoffed the first time you saw the IPL acronym. Back to my original point, I only care if the beer I’m drinking is good, not if it’s a good style. And it had all the attributes those five letters denote: it was certainly citrus and tropical fruit forward, more sweet/less bitter, and some of the clean, crisp expression of lagering over top/warm fermenting you’d look for in a lager and before you get all bunched up that lagers are ultra clear, then you need to have a kellerbier my friend. I think even some progressive German brewers could clearly see their way to appreciating an NEIPL or NEIPA, even if they can’t see through it clearly.

The Session #118: Who You Gonna Invite?

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Brian Yaeger

The Session creator Stan Hieronymus first launched this beer blogging exercise in 2007. For his third time hosting, he poses the question “Who you gonna invite?” More specifically, “If you could invite four people dead or alive to a beer dinner who would they be? What four beers would you serve?” He then added, “To participate, answer these questions Dec. 2 in a blog post (or, what the heck, in a series of tweets).” Not one to be known for my punctuality, I picked up the gauntlet of tweeting or microblogging over a series of 16 tweets (below). Since, let’s be honest, if you don’t say it on Twitter, you might as well be the tree that falls in a lonesome woods. My responses are no #pizzagate, but hopefully they’ll find a few readers nonetheless. At least I can promise these are not fake.

I WAS RIGHT (5,005 Breweries)

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Brian Yaeger

Ask my long-suffering wife. By that token, ask any of my ex girlfriends. Ask my parents. Ask any of my friends over the last 30 years. Ask any of my ex friends if the reason they’re no longer my friends is because they think I always have to be right. But the takeaway here is: I was right.

Back when Derrick Peterman of Ramblings of a Beer Runner hosted the 67^th monthly installment of The Session, a beer blogging exercise. In short, he wanted to know how many American breweries there’d be in five years. At the time (2012), the Brewers Assocation (BA) stated there were 2,126 in operation. To start off his round-up, Derrick said, “As for who wins the prize, forgive the sappy cliché but you’re all winners.” But he, unlike me, was wrong. Oh sure, David Blascombe of Good Morning… was also right in a slightly more general sense. He was more not-wrong than I was right (on the money). He put down “Over 5,000.” I predicted 5,001. Seriously, click on that.

In my blog, I reasoned that, “it’d be logical that since more Americans prefer beer to wine, there should be more breweries. Or at least the same amount. Fine, how about at least HALF as many!?”

This morning, the BA announced that on November 30, 2016, the United States reached a new peak in the brewery population: 5,005. They further pointed out that it is half the number of wineries.

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Bart Watson, Ph.D. is the BA’s Chief Economist. Dude’s got mad numbers skills. And I pinged him this past summer, when I noticed that the official count had topped 4,500, if he thought my prognostication was correct in pegging the year-end tally at five grand. “We’re averaging closer to two a day (net) over the past 12 months rolling,” Watson said, regarding the rate at which breweries open. “Based on what I see – I think end of the year is about when I’d predict 5,000, though could be a bit longer if closings finally start to tick up.” For all the media speculation about the craft beer bubble bursting, and some dire reports painting a slow-down, I’m going on record as saying: nuh uh. Don’t buy it. Well, the “craft” segment as a whole may continue to grow at a snail’s pace, but grow it will. More specifically, the number of breweries will continue to climb even if that means that the largest producers—or perhaps just the mid-range ones—will see stagnant sales. To bolster this assessment, Watson added, “There were 6,080 active Federal licenses at the end of 2015, so it’s just a matter of when all those breweries in planning open their doors.”

Here in Portland, we have 65 commercially operating breweries. That’s a number that all but about five other cities would be screaming “Saturation Point.” And yet we just welcomed three new ones in a third-mile radius. And three more are on track to open this winter. There’s absolutely reason that every American city with our population or larger can’t sustain as many breweries. That’s 25 larger cities by population. Some 640,000 people call Portland home. Denver has about 690,000 and, congratulations Mile High City, you’ve passed Portland with your 73 breweries. San Diego (pop. 1,4M) claims 130, but that’s all of SD County. The 690,000 folks who live in Seattle proper have 59 breweries to call their own.

On the flip side, my most recent Beer Traveler column for All About Beer focuses on metropolises that are just turning into beer destinations, places like Fredericksburg, Virginia and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Yeah Iowa! If you brew it, they will come!

Below are the rest of the predictions submitted back in 2012. Not that they are all below 5,000. Technically, Derrick asked for our predictions in exactly five years, so mid-2017, but I say we’ll have at least 5,400 next summer, unless people stop loving beer, or there’s an asteroid heading for the US, or Trump’s economy wreaks havoc on par with Prohibition + planetary annihilation.

Just for funsies, remember this number: 8,075*. Between the openings and inevitable closures, that’s my guess… How many breweries do you think will be operating in America in 2022?

*Edit from 2022: The BA announced there are 9,552 breweries in America. Missed it by “that” much.

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4,252 In their Session debut, The Brew Gentlemen

3,189 Alan McCormick of Growler Fills

3,125 is the number Jon Abernathy of the Brewsite predicts My good friend Jon… my poor, stupid friend Jon… predicted…

Around 3,000 opines Sean Inman of Beer Search Party

2,831 is the number Chris Staten of DRAFT Magazine

2,620 Stan Hieronymus of Appellation Beer Stan is obviously quite wiser than I. But…

2,589.5 is the prediction by What We’re Drinking, … his home town of Dayton, OH, he writes: “I do think that 3-4 local, small scale breweries can be sustained within a city the size of Dayton…”…It’s worth noting the population of metro Dayton, OH is about 840,000. (Editor’s Note: there are currently FIVE in Dayton)

2,500 is the number by Roger Mueller of A Fool and His Beers

1 A dire prediction that one megabrewer will control the world comes from Jon Jefferson of 10th Day Brewing.

The Session #107: Are Breweries Your Friends?

Posted on December 30, 2015 by Brian Yaeger

session As a precursor, to put this briefly, I’ve been a bad beer blogger. And when it comes to The Session, if I were Catholic, I’d type something like “Forgive me Father, it’s been 30 Sessions since my last participation.” (Click here if you care to see old contributions from my initial blog, Red, White, & Brew) My New Year’s resolution is to be better.

For the 107^th ed. of The Session, Dan Conley of Community Beer Works in Buffalo NY asks, a bit self-servingly (wink-wink foreshadowing), “Are breweries your friends?”

I say self-servingly because his blog is his brewery’s blog. And it worked. I really wanna try Community Beer Works beer now. And drink their beer and be a part of their community at least for the day. The topic, and hosting this Session, makes them seem, well, friendly. Conley expounds:

“To be in business nowadays you pretty much have to have a social media presence. This is especially true in the beer world, where some breweries have basically built themselves on their personality. And yet, at the end of the day, we’re selling you something.”

Conley continues, “Do you want your feeds clear of businesses, or do you like when a brewery engages with people? …As the person who does our social media…I struggle with this problem.”

My answer is: No.

Breweries are not our friends. Maybe I’m just speaking for myself and should say breweries are not my friends. But unlike Mitt Romney who famously said, “Corporations are people, my friend” (thanks in part to Citizens United), brewing companies are companies and therefore incapable of playing air hockey with me, taking me to a Portland Timbers game (except I suppose their sponsor Widmer Brothers Brewing could), or giving me a card that makes fun of my age for my next birthday. These are things friends do. Friends buy me beer. Breweries make the beer. And even then, what we love about craft beer is that brewers make the beer and, in the best of cases, we know their names and faces. And if you’re lucky, you’re friends with your local brewer(s).

Friendship is a relationship. Indeed, we have a relationship with the breweries that make the beer we choose to drink. And no doubt we have emotions surrounding breweries. In the case of local ones that we support, that emotion may be love. We are passionate about their beer. Given that most of us will never even have a beer from thousands of the 4,300 breweries that exist in the US alone, the emotion we feel for them may be indifference or lack of emotion. And in a few cases where folks feel they’ve been betrayed when a brewery sells out to ABI, a darker emotion courses through their bloodstream. Think about this: would a friend ever sell himself to the house of Bud and leave you high and dry (not that any of us would give up drinking beer altogether, mind you).

Heck, to Conley’s point, we “like” breweries on Facebook, and we delight when we see shiny new fermenters delivered just as we dote over actual friends’ newly delivered bouncing babies. But ultimately, no, breweries are not our friends. They are places we go with our friends. They are places that provide us beer to enjoy as part of our friend rituals. And to succeed, they need to have friendly service. But in the case of social media, I think it’s weird when they have actual personal profiles instead of business pages. I am on the fence about when I see a local brewery’s FB page “like” my pictures. But I’m still happy to tag them by checking in when I’m drinking at them with my friends.

The Session 93: Why Travel

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Brian Yaeger

Ohboy has it been awhile since I’ve partaken in The Session (July, 2013 #73 to be specific), but I have a new blog and a new take on beer travel, both as a result of just having lived in Europe for a year as well as having a beer travel guidebook coming out in 3 weeks. Fittingly for this edition of the monthly beer blogging Session, Maria and Brian Devine over at the Roaming Pint ask:

Why is it important for us to visit the place where our beers are made? Why does drinking from source always seem like a better and more valuable experience? Is it simply a matter of getting the beer at it’s freshest or is it more akin to pilgrimage to pay respect and understand the circumstances of the beer better?

Why go out of your way to visit breweries when, if you’re me, there’s a growler filling station in the supermarket directly across the street next to a beer aisle that’s roughly 30 yards long? Because drinking beer is not a solo sport. It’s also not the type of sport I prefer to armchair quarterback. Like John Fogerty, I wanna exclaim, “Put me in, Coach.” I think, collectively, we like visiting breweries because we all want to be where the action is in center field.

As a beer lover, there’s nothing more sacred than supporting your local brewery, except, perhaps, going on a beer trip to explore and support someone else’s local brewing establishment. It connects you to that place in a way visiting some other “must see”s don’t. Meet me in St. Louis? That arch thing is pretty cool, that’s like lemmings jumping off a cliff; you only go because everyone else does. Touring the Budweiser factory is certainly a worthy expenditure of time but, allow me to make this crack, getting to sample Bud afterward is hardly a reward. No, instead go to the Schlafly Tap Room or, better yet, the Urban Chestnut taproom. You’ll get much more than a pint of Hopfen IPA, you’ll get a taste of what the locals are like (at least the ones who don’t work for AB-I). On the flip side, I recently (finally) made it to Brussels and to its most famous brewery among the geek set, Cantillon. You don’t really meet locals sipping Gueuze at the bar but knowing that you’re among the billions of critters adrift in the air you’re breathing that are responsible for making that world-class spontaneously fermented ale is momentous. (The fact that I met Jean-Pierre van Roy and his son Jean van Roy didn’t hurt.)

Ultimately, beer is more than beer. It’s people, it’s place, and it’s personality. And just like you can read a beer review and gather what it’s like to try it but it’s better to crack open a bottle or can and experience it for yourself, the exact same applies to drinking said beer where it was made. Why settle for reading the marketing spiel about the birthplace of your favorite brew printed somewhere on the label or six-pack carrier when you can submerge yourself in the entire experience. The smell of malt lilting in the air as you approach a production brewery never gets stale. Magpies aren’t the only ones who like bright, shiny objects; the way one’s eyes light up upon seeing the overhead lights bounce of the stainless top of a mash tun rings true for every devotee of flavorful suds. And, if you’re lucky, you might get to shake the hand of the man, woman, men, or mixed nuts responsible for making that liquid, fermented dream come true. Sure they appreciate it when you buy their beer from a bar or bottle shop wherever you live, but they really love it when you take your valuable time to make that pilgrimage to thank them in person.

I’ve been to hundreds of breweries and I never tire of it. And I always look for someone wearing rubber boots in the tasting room because a big part of enjoying beer is sharing, or listening, to stories whether they involve beer or not.

Brian Yaeger: Beer Writer

Beer. Words. Stories.

Category Archives: The Session