Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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The Extinction Of Returnable Beer Bottles

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You know you’re old and curmudgeonly when you remember fondly returnable beer and soda bottles. They had a heft to them, felt heavier in your hand or carrying them to the car. That’s because they were made to last, to be used over and over again. I hadn’t really thought about it until this morning, but that was real recycling, well before the term had even been coined. But it was just practical to make things that could be re-used. It’s almost a cruel joke that as a society we’re so obsessed lately with recycling when without realizing it we were doing far more of it years ago before almost all packaging, including bottles and cans, became throwaways. If we really cared more about the environment and the world than our own selfish “convenience” then it would be easy to just return to … well, returnables.

Unfortunately, I’d say it would be almost impossible to change our collective habits at this point (yes, I’m a pessimist as well as a curmudgeon) despite the fact that many places around the world never stopped using returnable bottles. Germany is a prime example of this. All the beer bottles sold there are returnables and every brewery has huge stacks of cartons filled with bottles waiting to be cleaned and reused. Obviously, their economy hasn’t suffered and people haven’t decided to stop drinking beer because they might have to return the bottles rather than just throw them away. But I just can’t see that happening here where everything is about being fast and convenient, where it’s all about “instant” gratification. Lest you accuse me of being too self-righteous, I include myself among the lazy multitudes.

I bring this up because the Lehigh Valley [Pennsylvania] Morning Call has an interesting article about their local beer, Straub Brewery, and how Returnable beer bottles to become extinct if Straub doesn’t get back some cases. It’s not surprising that Straub is one of only two breweries who are still using returnable beer bottles — the other being Yuengling — and that both are in Pennsylvania, since the Commonwealth is the lone remaining (as far as I know) case state, meaning almost all beer is sold by the case at what are called “beer distributors.” This may have made sense in 1933, but it’s become an increasingly antiquated system as the years have rolled on.

From the article:

Straub Brewery, a 138-year-old family-owned business about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, is begging customers mostly in Pennsylvania but also some in Ohio, New York and Virginia to return thousands of empty cases.

Without them, Straub says it will do as nearly every brewer has done over the years — eliminate returnable bottles from its inventory. Only one other major brewer and the nation’s oldest , D.G. Yuengling & Sons of Pottsville, still sells beer in returnable bottles. But it plans to phase out the practice by fall.

All major brewers, including Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors, gave up on returnable bottles years ago because their costs multiplied with national distribution. About 12 percent of all U.S. beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981, but since 2007 the percentage has been negligible, according to the Beer Institute in Washington, D.C. In Pennsylvania, more than a quarter of all beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981, but that was when state liquor control laws required most beers to be sold by the case through distributors which readily accepted the returns.

So hopefully their customers will heed the call and start returning their bottles so they can be used again. I know it’s a forgone conclusion that returnable bottles will die out at some point, but the nostalgic, romantic in me (a.k.a. old man) still thinks that the returnable is an idea that should be revisited, especially with the recent increased focus on being green. It would be hard to argue that reusing bottles and packaging wouldn’t ultimately be better for the environment than our current recycling efforts. But I think Dick Yuengling summed up the situation best.

“The consumer’s been indoctrinated; we’re a throwaway society,” Yuengling said. “Everybody’s environmentally conscious, but if you put a case of returnable bottles in front of them, they say, ‘What’s that?'”

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Is A-B Eyeing The Craft Brewers Alliance?

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In a provocative article today, the business-oriented website, TheStreet.com, which describes itself as the “leading digital financial media company,” pondered whether Anheuser-Busch InBev might possibly be considering buying the Craft Brewers Alliance (CBA). The piece, by Miriam Reimer, entitled Anheuser-Busch Takeover Target: Craft Brewers Alliance?, certainly had the wags wagging on the blogosphere today.

There’s a great reminder of just how insignificant craft beer is to the business world in the opening paragraph, which refers to the CBA as that “little-known craft beer maker.” Compared to the big two, that’s understandable, but given that the brands in CBA are some of craft’s biggest players, it’s also pretty funny and humbling. But it’s good to remember that what many of us take so seriously is just a very small sliver of a much bigger pie.

At any rate, the idea of ABI buying the CBA was floated by Washington Street Investments president Bryce Peterson. Despite stating that “such speculation is premature,” he had no problem engaging in it himself. The thinking is, apparently, that ABI “might think it’s smart to buy a strong brand in the craft area and use its incredible distribution and marketing strengths to grow the acquired business.” Which sounds good on paper, but that’s exactly the reason that Anheuser-Busch earlier invested in the CBA brands individually, before their merger in 2008. When craft beer was beginning it’s latest growth trend, A-B distributors started wanting to carry some, too, and that drove A-B to partner with RedHook and Widmer to satisfy that demand. As a result, I’m not sure what buying the remaining 64.4% of CBA that ABI does not own would accomplish. The bulk of the article is given over to share prices, quarterly sales, and other business analysis. It’s interesting, up to a point, but all the numbers don’t seem to manage to answer the basic question of what advantage there would be for ABI. Plus, isn’t ABI still trying to trim the fat to pay for buying Anheuser-Busch?

The article concludes with a poll, asking readers to answer the question posed by the title: “Yes — Anheuser-Busch sees long-term potential in Craft’s growing corner of the market” or “No — Anheuser-Busch wouldn’t bother with such a small-time player.” What’s surprising is that as of this evening better than 17% thought “no.” They obviously are oblivious to A-B’s history. I’ve never seen a niche market too small for them try to own or destroy … ever. And InBev is even more ruthless than A-B was, so it’s hard to imagine them not going after craft beer in some fashion. Whether it will be by buying the CBA, at least at this point, is still an open question.

UPDATE 8.26: Author Miriam Reimer did a follow-up article to this one, Anheuser-Busch Thirsty for Craft Brewers, Poll Says, focusing on the poll at the end of it. She contacted me about the piece, and we spoke on the phone for a good half-hour, quoting me briefly in the article on page 2.

You Should Know Jack

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Jack McAuliffe may just be the most elusive figure in the short history of craft beer. He was craft before craft beer was cool. The former Navy man and engineer founded the very first modern microbrewery in Sonoma County, California in 1976 (New Albion incorporated October 8, 1976) and began production the following year using a brewery he built from spare parts. His New Albion Brewery was all alone for at least three years until Sierra Nevada Brewing joined him in 1980, essentially doubling the number of new breweries.

But New Albion was a bit ahead of its time and by 1982 was out of business. As I understand it, a disheartened McAuliffe tired of reliving his brewery’s failure, and eventually disappeared from the burgeoning beer community that his efforts inspired. For a number of years, few people knew where he was, but Maureen Ogle managed to track him down living in Las Vegas when she was working on Ambitious Brew and provides one of the fullest accounts of the New Albion Brewery beginning at Page 291. More recently, after a bad car accident landed McAuliffe in intensive care, he moved to San Antonio, Texas to live with his sister. Happily, San Antonio has taken to their adopted son, and the San Antonio Express-News had a nice story about Jack and his new collaboration with Sierra Nevada Brewing, San Antonio’s Jack McAuliffe is namesake of commemorative Sierra Nevada beer.

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Ken Grossman pours a beer for Jack McAuliffe as (I think) Charlie Bamforth looks on.

The latest collaboration beer celebrating Sierra Nevada’s 30th anniversary this year is based on a beer that Jack used to make at New Albion for another annual celebration.

In the late ’70s, New Albion brewed a special beer for annual Summer Solstice parties that didn’t particularly hew to any style, but occupied a space somewhere between a porter and a barley wine.

Using that concept and the ingredients that were available at the time, Ken and Jack’s Ale recipe was born. It contains Canadian two-row and European caramel barley and a combination of Cascade and cluster hops.

Grossman describes the beer as a “dark barleywine that is bottle fermented.” It clocks in at 10 percent ABV, which McAuliffe points out is the upper limit of what conventional yeast can survive. Like any beer, you can drink this one right away, but it will likely improve with age.

It’s certainly great to see Jack McAuliffe in the public eye again. Few people deserve to be more well-known in the beer world than him. It’s a real shame that so few people know Jack and his contribution to the modern craft beer community. We all really should know Jack. Hell, I think October 8 should be considered the birthday of modern craft beer, which in a couple of weeks will celebrate its 34th. Let’s all raise a toast to Jack, every year, on that day.

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Jack & Ken’s Ale, a black barley wine.

Miette’s Stout Cupcakes

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Alton Brown, from the Food Network, recently handed down his choices for the Nation’s Top Ten Sweets. Making the list for the “Best Beer-Spiked Cupcake” was the Bay Area’s own Miette. With two locations in San Francisco (the Ferry Building & Hayes Valley) and one in Oakland (at Jack London Square), here’s how Brown describes them:

A former dot-commer started this mini-chain after a successful stint at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, and her gingerbread cupcake might be the reason for Miette’s popularity. Made with a dark stout beer, it’s super moist and topped with lightly sweetened cream-cheese frosting and a candied orange flower.

A cake made with beer, and picked as one of the best in America? That’s something I just had to eat. So I stopped by the Ferry Building location last week to try one for myself. Because it was late in the day, they were actually out of the cupcakes, but they did have a full-sized cake left. So I splurged on the whole cake. Besides, like beer, sweets are best when they’re shared.

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Miette’s website describes their Gingerbread cake and cupcakes as “[o]ur all~time best selling cake. Made with a dark stout beer, molasses, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon and cardamom then topped with a sweet cream cheese frosting.” I spoke to the manager of the Ferry Building Miette’s, and she checked with the owner about what beer they used. It turned out they use Guinness as the stout for the cake.

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So how does it taste? It was quite delicious, especially paired with a nice stout. It was extremely moist and the ginger worked wonderfully with the beer. It’s very rich. The sweetly delicate icing was a great compliment to the flavors in the cake. It’s easy to see why it’s their best-seller. My only criticism? I would like to see them perhaps use a locally brewed stout. There are plenty of tasty stouts made in the Bay Area. But apart from that, definitely pick up Miette’s lovely gingerbread beer cupcake or cake.

Beer In Art #89: Baltimore Beer-Drinking Immigrant Family

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Most of the details about today’s work of art are unknown to me, but despite that it still was too good not to feature. All I know is that it depicts an immigrant family, originally from the Netherlands, living in Baltimore, Maryland and was painted by the father of the family shown in the painting.

It apparently hangs in the museum of the Maryland Historical Society. Unfortunately, I can find no information about it on their website. They appear to have quite a few paintings online, but not knowing the artist or the title of the painting makes it a bit more difficult to find. I don’t even know when it was painted, but I’m guessing the late 1800s or the very early part of the 20th century.

Most of the adults have a beer in their hand. I count a total of nine glasses of beer. The couple in the center foreground look sickly, almost pale enough to be considered zombies. But it’s still a very compelling painting. If anyone has any actual details about the painting, please do let me know.

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Dan Aykroyd For Schlafly Beer

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Paul A. Ner, who writes By the Pint, tweeted a fun photo of SNL alum and Blues Bro Dan Aykroyd holding a bottle of Schlafly Pale Ale.

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Nice, I’m convinced one of the ways to pull more people into the craft beer world is through celebrity endorsements, not paid ones, just by seeing more and more famous folks drinking craft beer. Somewhere I have a current TV show star drinking a Drake’s IPA through a straw. I’m going to have to dig that up.

It reminds of a famous marketing strategy I learned about in college, perhaps one of the first stealth marketing campaigns. The Lacoste brand — the one with the crocodile on polo shirts — did well in Europe but not in the U.S. So in the late fifties and early sixties they began sending free shirts to famous people; movie stars, politicians, etc. Low and behold the shirts starting showing up in magazine, newspaper and newsreel photos of the celebrities and sales began to take off. Perhaps we should do something similar, maybe a Flickr pool of the famous drinking craft beer.

CBS Highlights Consumer Reports Beer Tasting

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I almost forgot about this. The week before last I got a call from the local CBS television station, CBS 5, asking me to comment on a story they were working on regarding a recent Consumer Reports beer tasting that was published in their August issue. In Bargain beer from Costco, they had consumers taste blind the Kirkland brand beers, Costco’s private label beer, with prominent commercial brands of a similar style — Samuel Adams Boston Lager, Samuel Adams Boston Ale, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and Paulaner Hefe-Weizen.

The conclusion was that their “untrained panelists liked the Costco beers about as much as the same-style name-brand beers. (For each type, some people liked the Kirkland Signature better, some liked the brand name better, and some liked both equally.) Our consultants said that although the brand-name beers were more flavorful, clean-tasting, and complex, the Costco beers were quite quaffable and, to use the consultants’ technical term, ‘party-worthy.'”

The CBS producer asked me if I was “surprised” by those results. I explained that I wasn’t, and proceeded to tell her about the basics of how a private label beer is created, that licensed commercial breweries work with a retailer to create and brew the beer for them. I did a number of private label lines of beers when I worked at Beverages & more, beers like Coastal Fog, Brandenburg Gate and Truman’s True Brew. We also had a label in development to be called J.R. Brooks to do English styles like India Pale Ale, but I left before it saw the light of day. Anyway, I went on explaining that almost any private label beer done by a good brewery will likewise be pretty good, too. Nothing surprising about it all. It’s simply that most consumers probably don’t think about where the beer comes from, nor should they, I suppose. All that matters is that it tastes good. And then I added, almost as an afterthought, just to hammer home the point that private label beers that come from good homes are usually good beers, that it was Gordon Biersch that created and brewed the Costco beers.

At that point, the producer asked if they could come to my home in Novato and interview me on camera for the story they were working on. I agreed, but they called back and asked if there might be some beer-themed location that might also work. I suggested Moylan’s brewpub, since it’s only a mile or so from my house. We met there, they shot some B-roll of me walking with beer, sniffing a beer, drinking a beer, getting a beer poured. Then they picked a location and we sat down to talk on camera for about ten minutes. As I expected, they used under a minute in the finished story.

The video itself is online, but you’ll have to watch it there as they don’t seem to allow embedding.

You never know how these things will turn out, and the bit they zeroed on on, of course, was that the beer was made by Gordon Biersch. They treated it like a scoop of sorts, though it’s not exactly a secret. Whenever a contract private label beer is made, publicly available forms must be filed with the proper authorities, labels approved, etc. The labels, of course, by law must include the city and state where the beer was brewed, so it’s usually not that hard to figure out who made a private label beer. When you see Paso Robles, CA on a Trader Joe’s beer, you can pretty much guess that Firestone Walker brewed it. So when the Kirkland beers labels read “San Jose, California,” there aren’t too many production breweries in San Jose that could have made it. Really, anybody with just a little knowledge could have figured it out. When the labels were first approved, several people reported the news that Gordon Biersch would be making the Kirkland beers, myself included. I even spoke to Dan Gordon about it briefly at the time. But then they came out, and the news died away, as these things tend to do.

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On the TV report, they said they tried to reach Gordon Biersch but got “no comment” so I hope I didn’t “out” Dan in some way that will make life tough for him, though in truth I doubt that’s possible. As I said, who does private label contract beers is more of an open secret, everybody in the beer community knows who does them and the records with the specifics are public. It’s just that the public at large doesn’t usually care enough or have the inside knowledge necessary to figure it out, even if they did want to know.

I think what’s more surprising is that neither Consumer Reports or CBS thought to question who made the beer. In a report about comparing the taste of two different beers, one by a commercial brewery and one a private label beer, shouldn’t that have been the first question Consumer Reports asked: who made the second beer? That would have gone a long way in explaining the result, don’t you think?