This ran in The Street a couple of weeks ago, and I meant to post it before but it kept getting pushed down in the queue. Portland writer Jason Notte does an interesting job dissecting the industry and the recent kerfuffles over taxes in Why Success Is Killing the Craft Brew Industry. If you follow the business side of the beer industry, it’s worth a read.
For our 75th Session, our host is Chuck Lenatti, who writes Allbrews. His topic is about the business of beer, how to get a new brewery up and running or keep one going. It’s the part of the process that many would-be brewers aren’t experts at, and often trip themselves up at various points along the way from concept to being a going concern. So here’s his invitation to The Session for May 2013 and his topic, The Business of Brewing:
Like sandlot baseball players or schoolyard basketball junkies, many amateur brewers, including some beer-brewing bloggers, harbor a secret dream: They aspire to some day “go pro.” They compare their beer with commercial brews poured in their local pubs and convince themselves that they’ve got the brewing chops it takes to play in the Bigs. Some of them even make it, fueling the dream that flutters in the hearts of many other home brewers yearning to see their beer bottles on the shelves at City Beer or their kegs poured from the taps at Toronado.
Creating a commercial brewery consists of much more than making great beer, of course. It requires meticulous planning, careful study and a whole different set of skills from brewing beer. And even then, the best plan can still be torpedoed by unexpected obstacles. Making beer is the easy part, building a successful business is hard.
In this Session, I’d like to invite comments and observations from bloggers and others who have first-hand knowledge of the complexities and pitfalls of starting a commercial brewery. What were the prescient decisions that saved the day or the errors of omission or commission that caused an otherwise promising enterprise to careen tragically off the rails?
So on Friday, May 3, think about all of the breweries you’ve witnessed open, the ones that have succeeded and the ones that have come and gone. What was the difference? Which ones made it, and why do you think that is? What exactly makes a brewery successful, apart, of course, from making good beer.
Some beer businesses have worked out better than others.
(Time magazine, July 11, 1955)
The BBC’s News Magazine has an interesting article, US Craft Beer: How It Inspired British Brewers, that gives an overview of the rise of craft beer in America. Despite moving New Albion Brewing from Sonoma to San Francisco, the article does get most of the history reasonably right. And it’s also nice seeing my friend Melissa Cole quoted.
But the article doesn’t really deliver on the title, which I don’t mean as a criticism per se. It’s just that it’s more about craft beer becoming “fashionable,” trendy even in Great Britain than about British brewers being inspired by our beer. Certainly some are, and by everything I’ve seen and heard, it’s happening more and more, but I’ve also talked to British brewers who are convinced that UK consumers don’t want our hoppy or extreme beers. Yet when I was at GBBF a few years ago, the American brewers section was crowded all day long for the entirety of the festival. And when I accompanied Matt Brynildson to Marston’s in Burton-on-Trent to brew a collaboration beer for the J.D. Wetherspoon chain, the brewer — a terrifically nice person — refused to put in as many hops as Brynildson’s recipe called for, and he ended up having to adjust it. Even so, it proved to be one of the most popular beers at J.D. Wetherspoon’s festival that year. So I think that British beer drinkers are more interested in American-style beers than their brewers tend to believe is the case. At least that’s my anecdotal take, anyway.
Matt Brynildson and Melissa Cole at a J.D. Wetherspoon pub in London.
This is my seventh annual annotated list of the Top 50 so you can see who moved up and down, who was new to the list and who dropped off. So here is this year’s list again annotated with how they changed compared to last year.
Not too much movement this year, except for a few small shufflings. Only three new breweries made the list; Founders, Southern Tier and Karl Strauss.
Off the list was BJs Restaurant & Brewery, Narragansett Brewing and Goose Island Beer, which had plummeted 30 from #18 the year before, after selling their production brewery to Anheuser-Busch InBev.
If you want to see the previous annotated lists for comparison, here is 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006.
The Brewers Association has also just announced the top 50 breweries in the U.S. based on sales, by volume, for 2012. This includes all breweries, regardless of size or other parameters. Here is the new list:
Here is this year’s press release.
The Brewers Association just announced the top 50 craft breweries in the U.S. based on sales, by volume, for 2012, which is listed below here. For the sixth year, they’ve also released a list of the top 50 breweries, which includes all breweries. Here is the new craft brewery list:
Five breweries are new to this year’s Top 50 Craft Breweries list; Cold Spring Brewing/Third Street Brewhouse, Southern Tier Brewing, Ballast Point Brewing, Allagash and Tröegs Brewing. Here is this year’s press release.
I’ll have my annual annotated list shortly.
In what is the worst brewery accident I can recall hearing about, seven men died while cleaning out a tank in “a confined area” at the Grupo Modelo brewery in Mexico City. Bloomberg is reporting that the seven men died “due to unspecified toxins.”
Mental Floss had an interesting story about how Pabst Brewing Co. got the blue ribbon that graces every bottle and can of their beer. In How Did Pabst Blue Ribbon Win its Blue Ribbon? author Matt Soniak details the events at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago that led to Pabst claiming total victory and justifying that blue ribbon in the years that followed.
For the third straight year I missed the Bistro IPA Festival, even with them moving it from its usual August date to today. Happily, owner Vic Kralj was again kind enough to send me the list of the winners. Carlsbad Raceway IPA, from Pizza Port in Carlsbad, near San Diego, was chosen best in show at the 16th annual IPA Festival today at the Bistro in Hayward, California. The full list of winners is below.
At this year’s Craft Brewers Conference, the keynote address was given by Kim Jordan from New Belgium Brewing. The context of Jordan being asked this year to speak is because ten years ago, when CBC was in New Orleans, she gave an optimistic keynote speech then predicting that craft beer would break the 10% barrier. While we’re not quite there yet — the current estimate is 6.5% of volume — great progress has been made and the future certainly looks rosier than it did in 2003. As someone who was sitting in the audience in New Orleans during that keynote, I was keen to hear what Kim would have to say a decade later. Below is a photo I took of Jordan giving that speech in 2003.
Below is my video of Kim Jordan’s keynote address. Technical difficulties (okay, I was slow on the draw) delayed the start and I missed the first few seconds, probably no more than 30 seconds worth. Also, due to YouTube’s size limitations, I had to break it into two parts in order to upload it. Enjoy.
Part 1:
Part 2: