This weekend, September 11 & 12, the 7th annual Brews on the Bay beer festival will take place aboard the S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien anchored off Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. It’s put on by the San Francisco Brewers Guild. Tickets are $45 in advance, and may be purchased online. At the door, tickets are $55. See you there.
For the second time, San Francisco supervisor John Avalos has gone back on his word. As the sponsor of the the new proposed tax on all alcohol sold in San Francisco ordinance, he first told the Small Business Commission that he would delay a hearing on the tax in mid-July. But because of Proposition 26 on the ballet having the potential to do away with the type of tax masquerading as a fee that he’s proposing, he changed his mind and went forward with the hearing anyway. Later, in late August, it looked like it was all but inevitable that he would send it back into committee for more review due to overwhelming opposition by the business community. Well that didn’t last long either, and he changed his mind again and later today, at 2:00 p.m., the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will vote on the new tax. It’s likely that it will get the required six votes to pass and at that point will be voted on a second time at another board meeting on September 14.
It will then go to mayor Gavin Newsom, who has ten days to either sign or veto it. The mayor is on the record saying he’ll veto it, at which point it will be sent back to the Board of Supervisors who can override Newsom’s veto with eight votes. That would most likely be in early October. Why Avalos keeps saying one thing and doing another is pure politics, of course. The strategy now is that “he wants to push for a veto override.” The likeliest reason is that someone — perhaps the Marin institute? — has whispered in his ear that they can flip two supervisors and get him the two additional votes he needs to override the anticipated mayoral veto. The Marin Institute has begun marshaling their base to contact the politicians against the alcohol tax in a web alert. Obviously, that works both ways and I’d suggest that if you’re against the new tax, you should contact them and ask them to continue to oppose it.
If you’re in the city today and want to oppose this tax, please consider attending the meeting and voicing your opposition. I’ll have more on this later on today, but wanted to get this out as soon as possible.
UPDATE: Today’s vote has been canceled due to some sort of mix-up with the clerks office. It has now been rescheduled for next Tuesday, September 14.
Yesterday, we took our annual family-outing to pick hops at Moonlight Brewery in Sonoma County, California. Founder and brewmaster Brian Hunt has a quarter-acre he planted several years ago after Vinnie Cilurzo, from Russian River Brewing, had to pull out the hops he had at Korbel when he moved the brewery to Santa Rosa. Russian River’s now growing their own and Moonlight has continued to keep his hopfield going, using the hops primarily to brew his fresh hop beer Homegrown.
I’ve been volunteering to help pick hops for a number of years now, and began taking the family a few years ago, recreating how it would have been done in he later Nineteenth century before hops were harvested using machinery. In those days, the entire community would turn out to pick the hops, with the men working the fields, women putting on lavish picnic spreads (and helping with the picking) and the kids pitching in andalso playing among the hopvines. It’s great fun and really does feel like the community coming together to help out. Everyone does their part, and we all talk and laugh while sitting in the circle and picking the hops.
The Abbey de St. Humulus hop field, a.k.a. Moonlight Brewery
The beautiful green of hops in the field, ripe for the picking.
My daughter Alice outstanding in her field … hop field, that is.
Hops on the vine, as far as the eye can see.
A close-up of the hop cones, the flowers that will be picked and added to the beer.
Moonlight brewmaster Brian Hunt holding a bundle of hops, freshly cut down for picking.
The hopvines are placed in the center of a circle, where people work on each vine, pulling the hops off by hand and putting them into a plastic bucket.
My wife Sarah showing off her hop-picking skills.
Below is a slideshow of our family outing to pick hops. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.
And below is a short video of cutting down the hops and taking them to be picked.
Our 43rd Session is all about the new. Hosted by Carla Companion, better know as The Beer Babe, she’s tackling The New Kids, by which she means the many, many new breweries that have started up in the last couple of years.
Here’s how she explains it:
Picture yourself starting school, on a cool, crisp September day. Only, you’re not as excited as you usually are because you’re starting at a new school. No one knows who you are, groups of friends are already established, and you have nightmares about getting lost in the hallways trying to find your next class. How will you ever fit in?…
In some ways, there may be a beer-world parallel to this experience: new craft breweries joining an established beer community, or even tougher, breaking into a non-craft beer town.
….With the astounding growth of the number of craft breweries this year, chances are there’s a new one in development, or has just started out in your area. My challenge to you is to seek out a new brewery and think about ways in which they could be welcomed into the existing beer community. How does their beer compare to the craft beer scene in your area? Are they doing anything in a new/exciting way? What advice, as a beer consumer, would you give to these new breweries?
Take this opportunity to say hello to the new neighbors in your area. Maybe its a nanobrewery that came to a festival for the first time that you vowed to “check out” later. Maybe it’s a new local beer on a shelf on the corner store that you hadn’t seen before. Dig deeper and tell us a story about the “new kids on the block.” I look forward to welcoming them to the neighborhood!
She’s certainly right about the sheer number of new breweries. It defies logic, the economy and conventional wisdom about both. At every measure, at a time when most businesses are flat at best, the number of craft breweries continues to rise. In the past four years, over 250 new breweries have opened. How awesome is that? According to the BA’s wonderful brewery detective Erin Glass, roughly one new brewery is now opening every day, with more on the way. Last year, 110 new breweries opened, but in just the first six months of 2010, 155 have opened. According to a July report by the BA, Director Paul Gatza speculated that there could conceivably be 250 new brewery openings by the time the apple drops on Times Square signaling the end of this year.
And according to Gatza, “[i]t isn’t just an increasing number of nanobreweries, either. [Though frankly, I love the trend of Nano- and Pico-breweries.] We are seeing strong growth in the traditional brewery openings—you know, a business plan for a microbrewery or brewpub that gets out of the planning phase and into operation.”
And last year, Erin was tracking about 260 brewery project at various stages of development. Today the number she’s following is 389. Could we hit 2,000 breweries in America in the next few years? It sure seems possible, even inevitable. Imagine what might happen if (or when, trying to sound hopeful) the economy turns around.
Fourteen years ago, in 1996, it felt like we’d hit a wall. After a number of years of remarkable growth, more breweries began to close than were opening. The numbers looked bleak. The Craft Brewers Conference was a far more somber — dare I say sober — affair than it had been in earlier in that decade. But then things began to turn around. Slow but steady growth began in the late 1990s and has not only continued from that time, but even picked up speed.
Given the increases in market share by craft breweries, in both volume but especially dollars — and now a sharp increase in brewery openings over the last few years — it seems clear we’re in the midst of a new wave of craft beer. Like the the first wave, craft is again the subject of media attention, is increasingly taken seriously by the business world and is being targeted more vigorously by the big beer companies.
It certainly feels like this may be our time. Twenty years ago, microbreweries were mostly alone in promoting the idea of artisanal products. Today there’s artisanal cheese, bread, coffee, charcuterie, beef, chicken, pastries, ice cream and on and on, not to mention organic farming, with its produce and fruit. The world has caught on and caught up. More and more people just get it now, and increasingly each year’s newly minted 21-year olds that add to the percentage of craft beer drinkers in greater numbers. It will be interesting to see how the next few decades play out as time squeezes out the older mainstream beer drinkers in favor of younger generations who came of age in a world where craft beer was already established.
And those same generations are and will also responsible for a whole new group of brewers and brewery owners, too, as we’re starting to see right now. Large or small or really small, what a fun time to be drinking craft beer.
Last week I shared some of the highlights from the Brewers Association‘s bi-monthly Power Hour session that Ray Daniels tweeted about throughout the hour, whose topic was “Craft Brewing & Mid-Year Category Sales Review.” As a BA member, I also was able to look at the presentation after the fact and — with the Brewers Association’s permission — thought I’d share some more of the interesting statistics that SymphonyIRI revealed during their presentation.
And here’s a couple of graphs. The first shows the top ten craft brewing companies, with craft being defined more broadly by SymphonyIRI than the BA’s definition. Significantly, it shows that the purchase of Magic Hat/Pyramid/Portland breweries by North American Breweries catapulted them from #34 to #6.
The second compares sales by dollars between craft beer (in blue) and macro brands (in white) and divided by region of the country. The Southeast (24.6%) followed by the Great Lakes states (20.9%) experienced the greatest growth over last year. The big breweries saw their sales dip the most in the West (excluding California, at -3.7%) followed by the Southeast (-3.3%). Big brands actually had pretty good growth (9.2%) in the Northeast, though craft in that region was 15.9%, making it the third-highest region (along with the Plains states).
On KQED Radio this morning on the local show Forum with Michael Krasney held a defacto debate on the proposed Alcohol Mitigation Fee between San Francisco Brewers Guild president Rich Higgins and city supervisor John Avalos, who introduced the ordinance to tax alcohol sold in San Francisco. Rich held his own as best he could, but Avalos is a seasoned politician more used to dodging questions and spinning data his way. Plus, it seemed to me most of the callers were sympathetic to him and hostile to Rich, though most seemed more than a little uninformed (thanks local media). Same deal on the show’s web page, New Alcohol Fee for San Francisco?, where one commenter went so far as to call Rich unprepared because he didn’t know how to remedy the city’s financial problems, as if that’s his job. Unbelievable.
Perhaps most annoying was Michele Simon’s call. She’s an attorney and holds the position of Research & Policy Director for the Marin Institute, the organization that’s largely responsible for the proposed “fee” ordinance. She called to make it clear that their target was the big foreign alcohol companies and that she, too, likes beer or wine now and again so therefore the Marin Institute is not a neo-prohibitionist group, as she added that many of their critics have resorted to name-calling. Was she going for sympathy that anyone might have the temerity to be critical toward the organization? I call the Marin Institute a neo-prohibitionist because I sincerely believe that’s what they are, not because I’m on the playground in 5th grade. [Ms. Simon, in a comment (see below) also agrees that name-calling is a tired strategy. I would, however, counter that proper labeling of the character of any organization is useful, and even sometimes critical, to knowing their intentions. When I say the Marin Institute is a neo-prohibitionist group I do so not to simply lob a pejorative at them, but instead to characterize them as I indeed view them.]
Of course, their policies are what leads me to that conclusion. I know they keep saying they’re not anti-alcohol — and maybe they even believe it — but what they actually do is contrary to that. Actions speak louder than words. If it quacks like a duck, guess what it is? They may claim to be against just big alcohol, but their actions harm the small family breweries, wineries and distilleries far more than they ever hurt the big foreign corporations.
And they know it, too. Back when they were going after Alcopops, the big companies told them outright that if their legislation passed that every one of them would change the formula of their products so the new legislation would no longer apply to them. Who would it continue to apply to? All the small breweries who barrel-age their beers, that’s who. And they told the Marin Institute that fact directly to their face, in Sacramento. So they knew that their scheme would not do what they said it would and would instead directly harm people they claimed were not their target. What did they do? Crow about their hollow victory, that’s what.
Then there’s the fact that the Marin Institute gets at least a portion of its funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is most definitely not just a neo-prohibitionist group, but the neo-prohibitionist group. Read the Center for Consumer Freedom for their very different take on whether the Marin Institute is neo-prohibitionist or not. [Note: Ms. Simon writes that they no longer receive funding from the RWJF. The report I cited is from 2003, and it may well be they no longer do receive funding from them.]
I know that I’m not beloved in the halls of the Marin Institute, but that’s probably because they’re used to having most people, and particularly the media, swallow what they’re selling uncritically, often without examining it all. They enjoy widespread support because of the way they manipulate their information and shape propaganda to raise money from the faithful. Few politicians can stand up to them because of decades of demonizing alcohol on several fronts. And the media just seems to roll over rather than be seen as pro alcohol. That leaves mostly the industry to fight them, and they end up seeming too self-serving even if that’s not always the case. That’s how we got to where we are today, with alcohol paying more in taxes than any other consumer good — and still it’s not enough. It’s never enough.
Anyway, you can listen to the entire hour here, or you can go to the KQED archive and download it for later.
Still, overall I think Rich did much better than I would have done. I would have lost it on more than a few occasions. He at least kept his cool. Well done, Rich.
Rich Higgins in his brewery at Social Kitchen.
Here’s another interesting infographic that nicely shows both the production and consumption of beer worldwide. It’s interesting to see the relationship between the two for each nation side by side. You can then easily work out how much beer they export or how much beer is imported into each country. One caveat, it shows Europe producing more than Asia — which recently changed — suggesting the data may be at least older than this year.
The Turbo Tax Blog last month had an interesting post looking at the question of How Much Money Does The Government Make From Alcohol? It’s an overview, of course, and doesn’t include some of the dirty details that make alcohol the most taxed consumer good out there (though tobacco is pretty high, too), but there certainly is some interesting information contained in the rather large infographic.
An interesting international perspective was expressed in The Shout, an Australian trade publication covering “hotel, bar, club & liquor industry news.” The short piece, entitled “… as Specialist Hails Craft Beer Revival,” is about the International Beer Shop, a specialty beer store in Perth that carries 850 beers from around the world.
The shop’s manager, Cameron Stewart, has some great quotes about American craft beer’s influence on the rest of the world, to wit:
“Experimental US Craft Breweries have tipped the dominos, and they are falling throughout the Western World.”
…“Cutting-edge modern breweries constantly expand their ranges, developing and reinterpreting various beer styles to provide beer lovers with their next beer experience,” he said.
“These guys are constantly refining their art. They are the magicians of the beer world.”
Nice.
If you’re a member of the Brewers Association, a trade organization for small breweries, you have the opportunity to listen in on the bi-monthly Power Hour, an on-line, interactive teleconference series. This morning’s topic was “Craft Brewing & Mid-Year Category Sales Review.” I didn’t listen in to this one, but happily Ray Daniels, he of the Cicerone program, was kind enough to tweet a number of the statistics quoted in the talk by Dan Wandel, with the Symphony IRI Group, and better still, Todd Alstrom, posted Ray’s tweets on Beer Advocate where they can live forever instead of being lost in the ether. Below is just a few of the more interesting tidbits.
You can see the rest of Ray Daniels’ tweets here. Thanks again to Todd for saving me the trouble of having to go back and grab Ray’s tweets individually.