Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Top 50 Breweries For 2010

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ba
The Brewers Association has also just announced the top 50 breweries in the U.S. based on sales, by volume, for 2010. This includes all breweries, regardless of size or other parameters. Here is the new list:

  1. Anheuser-Busch InBev; St Louis MO
  2. MillerCoors; Chicago IL
  3. Pabst Brewing; Woodridge IL
  4. D. G. Yuengling and Son; Pottsville PA
  5. Boston Beer Co.; Boston MA
  6. Sierra Nevada Brewing; Chico CA
  7. New Belgium Brewing; Fort Collins CO
  8. North American Breweries; Rochester, NY
  9. Craft Brewers Alliance, Inc.; Portland, OR
  10. Spoetzl Brewery (Gambrinus); Spoetzl TX
  11. Deschutes Brewery; Bend OR
  12. Independent Brewers United (IBU); Burlington, VT
  13. F.X. Matt Brewing; Utica NY
  14. Minhas Craft Brewery; Monroe WI
  15. Bell’s Brewery; Galesburg MI
  16. Harpoon Brewery; Boston, MA
  17. Boulevard Brewing; Kansas City MO
  18. Goose Island Beer; Chicago IL
  19. Dogfish Head Craft Brewery; Lewes DE
  20. Alaskan Brewing; Juneau AK
  21. Long Trail Brewing; Burlington VT
  22. August Schell Brewing; New Ulm MN
  23. Stone Brewing; Escondido CA
  24. Abita Brewing; New Orleans LA
  25. Brooklyn Brewery; Brooklyn NY
  26. Lagunitas Brewing; Petaluma CA
  27. Full Sail Brewing; Hood River OR
  28. Shipyard Brewing; Portland ME
  29. Summit Brewing; Saint Paul MN
  30. New Glarus Brewing; New Glarus WI
  31. Great Lakes Brewing; Cleveland OH
  32. Anchor Brewing; San Francisco CA
  33. Iron City Brewing; Pittsburgh PA
  34. Kona Brewing; Kailua-Kona HI
  35. Rogue Ales/Oregon Brewing; Newport OR
  36. Firestone Walker Brewing; Paso Robles CA
  37. Winery Exchange Inc. / World Brew; Novato CA
  38. SweetWater Brewing; Atlanta GA
  39. Mendocino Brewing; Ukiah CA
  40. Flying Dog Brewery; Frederick MD
  41. Victory Brewing; Downington PA
  42. Gordon Biersch Brewing; San Jose CA
  43. BJs Restaurant & Brewery; Huntington Beach CA
  44. Stevens Point Brewery; Stevens Point WI
  45. Odell Brewing; Fort Collins CO
  46. Bridgeport Brewing (Gambrinus); Portland OR
  47. Cold Spring Brewing; Cold Spring MN
  48. Rock Bottom Brewery Restaurants; Louisville CO
  49. Oskar Blues Brewery; Longmont CO
  50. Straub Brewery; Saint Mary’s PA

Here is this year’s press release.

Top 50 Craft Breweries For 2010

By

ba
The Brewers Association just announced the top 50 breweries in the U.S. based on sales, by volume, for 2010, which is listed below here. For the fourth year, they’ve also released a list of the top 50 craft breweries based on the new definition adopted by the Brewers Association a few years ago, and updated earlier this year. Here is the new craft brewery list:

  1. Boston Beer Co.; Boston MA
  2. Sierra Nevada Brewing; Chico CA
  3. New Belgium Brewing; Fort Collins CO
  4. Spoetzl Brewery (Gambrinus); Spoetzl TX
  5. Deschutes Brewery; Bend OR
  6. Independent Brewers United (IBU); Burlington, VT
  7. Matt Brewing; Utica NY
  8. Bell’s Brewery; Galesburg MI
  9. Harpoon Brewery; Boston, MA
  10. Boulevard Brewing; Kansas City MO
  11. Dogfish Head Craft Brewery; Lewes DE
  12. Alaskan Brewing; Juneau AK
  13. Long Trail Brewing; Bridgewater Corners VT
  14. Stone Brewing; Escondido CA
  15. Abita Brewing; New Orleans LA
  16. Brooklyn Brewery; Brooklyn NY
  17. Lagunitas Brewing; Petaluma CA
  18. Full Sail Brewing; Hood River OR
  19. Shipyard Brewing; Portland ME
  20. Summit Brewing; Saint Paul MN
  21. New Glarus Brewing; New Glarus WI
  22. Great Lakes Brewing; Cleveland OH
  23. Anchor Brewing; San Francisco CA
  24. Kona Brewing; Kailua-Kona HI
  25. Rogue Ales/Oregon Brewing; Newport OR
  26. Firestone Walker Brewing; Paso Robles CA
  27. Sweetwater Brewing; Atlanta GA
  28. Flying Dog Brewery; Frederick MD
  29. Victory Brewing; Downingtown PA
  30. Gordon Biersch Brewing; San Jose CA
  31. BJs Restaurant & Brewery; Huntington Beach CA
  32. Stevens Point Brewing; Stevens Point WI
  33. Odell Brewing; Fort Collins CO
  34. Bridgeport Brewing (Gambrinus); Portland OR
  35. Rock Bottom Brewery Restaurants; Louisville CO
  36. Oskar Blues Brewery; Longmont CO
  37. Blue Point Brewing; Patchogue NY
  38. Lost Coast Brewery; Eureka CA
  39. Big Sky Brewing; Missoula MT
  40. North Coast Brewing; Fort Bragg CA
  41. Mac and Jack’s Brewery; Redmond WA
  42. The Saint Louis Brewery; St Louis MO
  43. Bear Republic Brewing; Cloverdale CA
  44. Karl Strauss Breweries; San Diego CA
  45. Breckenridge Brewery; Denver CO
  46. Utah Brewers Cooperative; Salt Lake City UT
  47. Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurants; Chattanooga TN
  48. Saint Arnold Brewing; Houston TX
  49. Real Ale Brewing; Blanco, TX
  50. Ninkasi Brewing; Eugene, OR

Two breweries are new to the Top 50 Craft Breweries list; Real Ale Brewing and Ninkasi. Here is this year’s press release.

I’ll have my annual annotated list shortly.

Celebrate Women In Brewing This Saturday At Rubicon

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For several years now, Rubicon Brewing in Sacramento has hosted an event celebrating women in brewing. This year’s Women in Brewing Main Event will take place this Saturday, April 16 all day long. Rubicon is located at 2004 Capitol Avenue in Sacramento.

From the press release:

Join us for our annual celebration of women in the craft brew industry! We’ve got some fantastic beers in store for y’all, including special brews from Sierra Nevada, Lost Coast, Auburn Alehouse, Stone, Santa Cruz Mountain, Blue Frog, Moylan’s, and more! So, stop in, have a pint, and chat with some amazing Women Brewsters. And above all … the event benefits a great organization, W.E.A.V.E.!

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The Automatic Personal Brewery

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When did homebrewing become so hard that people still want to do it but are looking for ways around the actual work of the brewing? First there was Brewbot: An Automated Homebrewing Machine, by an Australian designer, and now comes WilliamsWarn: The Personal Brewery, this time from New Zealand. Is it perhaps the folks down under who are getting lazy? (And thanks to brewer Andrew Mason for the hat tip.)

So brewmaster Ian Williams and food technologist (not sure what that is) Anders Warn worked for two years to develop the WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery, which looks as much like a fancy coffee machine as anything else.
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Here’s their “story” from the website:

The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery is the miracle that beer drinkers have been praying for. After 5000 years of brewing, the technology finally exists to allow you to brew the perfect beer. Your Personal Brewery is a breakthrough created by our brewmasters through a combination of their deep love of beer and their extensive knowledge of brewing.

In 2004, whilst Ian was working out of Denmark as an international brewing consultant and professional beer taster, he was challenged by his Uncle (a frustrated homebrewer) to invent the worlds first personal brewery. After 2 years part-time research he returned to New Zealand in 2006 and started fulltime research and development with help from his friend, Anders Warn. Finally in 2011, after several rounds of serious investment, after 100 brews and blind tastings and after many industrial prototypes, the first units and the ingredients to be used in them are ready for sale.

So after 5 years of intense development, the result is cold, perfectly carbonated, clear, commercial quality beer made in 7 days, like a modern brewery. All 78 official beer styles can be made as well as the option to develop your own.

I have to say I’m skeptical, especially watching them pour the malt syrup into the contraption. And it’s not exactly cheap, either, at $5,666 NZD (which is roughly $4,436 in American dollars). It seems like it would take quite a few 23 litre batches (about 6 gallons) before it would pay for itself. And the ingredients to make one batch is $49-52 NZD ($50 = $39 USD). So after purchasing the machine, it costs $39 per batch, getting you roughly 6 gallons of beer, or the equivalent of 2 2/3 cases of 12 oz. bottles or roughly 10 six-packs with a few bottles extra). Not including the price of the machine, the cost would be about $4 per six-pack, saving you maybe $2 for a macro brew and $4-5 per craft beer sixer. Let’s call it $4 savings per six-pack ($40 per batch) and it would take you 110 batches before you broke even.

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Ian Williams and Anders Warn with their Personal Brewery.

Watch the video to get a better idea of what it’s all about and how it works. What do you think? Am I crazy, or are these contraptions a bad idea that subvert the very idea of what it means to be a homebrewer? Throughout the press materials for the Personal Brewery, they talk about how it was just too hard to homebrew and the founder’s uncle wanted a simpler way to keep making beer at home. But I can’t help but wonder. Maybe his uncle should have given up and just bought beer from professionals. Does making beer using a machine that does all the work still constitute homebrewing? Certainly many of the bigger brewery’s systems are automated at various stages in the process. But I tend to think of homebrewing as a learning experience, where you learn to be a better brewer by doing, by putting in the time and the hard work. These homebrewing systems seem designed for a lazy person who wants to call themselves a “homebrewer” but without putting in any of the effort. An automatic personal brewery seems less like a hobby and more like having yet another kitchen gadget just to impress your friends. Though it’s hard not to be impressed with the engineering of it, and it is a beautiful looking machine. What do you think?

Cambridge Brewing Hinting At Bottling

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Tip of the hat to Todd Alstrom from Beer Advocate , who noticed that Cambridge Brewing Co.‘s Will Meyers tweeted out a link to a short survey asking his customers a few questions about buying beer in bottles, suggesting the brewpub is considering bottling some of the their beer. Here’s the introduction to the survey.

Thank you for taking the time to fill out this survey. Your answers will help determine the future of a Cambridge Brewing Company bottling program, and provide you with the beers you want in your local store. At this time, we are only in the beginning stages of planning our roll-out, but our success depends on you. So please let us know what you think, and what you want to drink.

Will later confirmed CBC’s plan to bottle, tweeting “Yup! Damn PSYCHED!” And to another, tweeted back that they’re “Considering it, but most interested in making our funkier beers. Lots of great ambers/pales out there already!” So that suggests they’re considering bottling the more interesting one-off and barrel-aged beers that Will has marinating in the basement … er, cellar. And that, I think, is most excellent news.

City Brewery Buys Former Coors Plant In Memphis

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Trying to catch up with all the news fluttering around the beer world, I see that last week the Hardy Bottling plant in Memphis, Tennessee has finally found a buyer. The brewery was originally built by Schlitz in 1971 and then Stroh’s operated it for a time before selling it to Coors, where they brewed their Blue Moon line of stealth micros, along with Zima and Keystone. MolsonCoors shut it down in 2006 and I seem to recall there were some labor disputes there, too. Then later that same year it was sold for $9 million and it became the Hardy Bottling Co.

City Brewing, of La Crosse, Wisconsin, agreed to buy the brewery for $30 million, plus will invest an additional $11 million to renovate and update the facility. When it reopens this summer, it will be renamed Blues City Brewery.

From the press release:

City Brewing Company is the 4th largest brewer in the United States. Prior to this acquisition, City Brewing had over 6,000,000 barrels of capacity between its breweries in La Crosse, Wis. and Latrobe, Pa. The Company currently has approximately 720 employees. With the addition of the Memphis brewery, City Brewing will exceed 10,000,000 barrels (135 million cases) of brewing capacity. The acquisition of the Hardy Bottling Plant in Memphis offers City Brewing the ability to rapidly increase its capacity for brewing, packaging and distribution for its existing customer base as well as to expand its brewing and packaging services to new customers and markets, including those currently served by Hardy. “City Brewing Company welcomes the opportunity to work with Carolyn Hardy and the current staff to fully develop the brewing and packaging capabilities of the Memphis facility.” stated City Brewing President George Parke. “This is truly a significant occasion for our industry and a unique and remarkable opportunity for Memphis, Tennessee.” Carolyn Hardy added.

Iron City Sold To NY Equity Firm

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The struggling former Pittsburgh Brewing, who emerged from bankruptcy in 2007 as Iron City Brewing, has been purchased by a New York-based private equity firm, Uni-World Capital for an undisclosed sum. The investor group led by Timothy Hickman that purchased Iron City from bankruptcy is selling the “company’s Iron City and IC Light labels, some lesser brands and the company’s other assets.” Iron City remains headquartered in Pittsburgh, despite having moved production to nearby Latrobe, PA, where it contracts its beer from the former Rolling Rock brewery that was purchased by Wisconsin’s City Brewing when Anheuser-Busch abandoned it after buying the Rolling Rock brand in 2006. To read more, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the fullest account of this story.

Q&A With Jack McAuliffe

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Last week, you may recall, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Jack McAuliffe, founder of the first modern microbrewery in America; New Albion Brewery. That was the week after the annual Craft Brewers Conference, which was held this year in San Francisco. At CBC, the elusive Jack was in town for his first appearance at a public beer event in a very, very long time. He was going to do a Q&A session along with a short talk by Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew, and Jack’s daughter, Renee DeLuca, who writes online at the Brewer’s Daughter. As an amateur beer historian, and lover of the subject, seeing the man who built the first microbrewery from scratch back in 1976 was simply something I was not going to miss. I arrived early and got a chance to meet Jack for the first time. Needless to say, it was a great treat.

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Jack and me at CBC.

After a talk by Jack’s daughter Renee on social media, Maureen discussed “The Long View of the Big Picture,” lessons learned from failed breweries and what the ones who survived did to keep going. Then the session was turned over to jack, who answered questions from the audience for a good half hour. I recorded Jack’s Q&A and you can listen to it below. Enjoy.

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Brewbot: An Automated Homebrewing Machine

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This is an odd one, if not without a certain interest just for the effort involved and how it works. For a design contest, The RX MCU Design Contest, sponsored by Renesas, an Australian designer, Matt Prattau (a.k.a. Zizzle), created the Brewbot, an automated homebrewing system that does all the work.

Here’s his introduction, from the contest submission:

Home brewing beer can be a rewarding mix of art and science. It allows the brewer to explore the thousands of possibilities available using the dozens of varieties of hops, malt, yeast and other interesting ingredients. The process can be time consuming and results can vary due to many factors, including precision, technique and consistency used by the brewer in the process.

Imagine an appliance in your kitchen that could take the time and labor out of the brewing process and brew a consistent batch of beer each time thus allowing the user to focus on the ingredients and recipe.

I always thought that the actual work of homebrewing was part of the fun, not something to be avoided, but still, you have to admire the way he did it. Here’s what it looks like. The submission page also includes links to schematics and other information about the design. He’s also set up a blog where he tracks his progress entitled Brewbot Mk2

automated-beer-brewery

Hack A Day blogged about the Brewbot, and had this to say:

You can see the development board there just to the left of the brew kettle. It’s network connected with a web interface that allows you to take recipes from Brewtarget and import them directly to the system. All you need to do is make sure that you load up the grain basket and boil addition modules to match your recipe. The bot takes it from there, filling the kettle, preheating that water, lowering the grains and maintaining temperature for the mash, and completing the boil with additions from the servo-controlled PVC pipe pods. Experienced brewers will notice a few steps missing, like the sparge, and a quick way to cool the finished wort. But this does take a huge part of the drudgery out of our hands. If only it had a clean-in-place system … then we’d really be happy!

But to get a real feel for it, check out the video where the designer walks you though the steps of how it works.

Summit Celebrates The Return Of Legal Beer

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Summit Brewing, in St. Paul, Minnesota, commissioned a local artist, Miss Amy Jo, to create a poster celebrating the passage of the Cullen-Harrison on its effective date of April 7, 1933. Eight months before the repeal of Prohibition, the bill allowed the production of 3.2 beer in about twenty states, including Minnesota. I love the retro look of it. It will probably drive historian Bob Skilnik batty, but it’s a cool poster and it’s available for purchase at Summit’s online store.

Summit-2011RepealPoster