The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article last week about an apparently growing trend, entitled Hop Farmers Find Growth Business. Essentially it chronicles how many people saw all the stories that began last fall reporting the shortage of hops and the huge rise in prices for the essential beer ingredient and saw an opportunity. As a result, despite the steep learning curve and heavy capital needed, a number of people have apparently turned to growing hops. Some are brewers hoping to control at least a small portion of their own destiny, some are part-time entrepreneurs looking to cash in, while still others are trying to make a go of at as full-time hop farmers.

I know several brewers who have planted small amounts of hops on their existing property or have bought or leased additional land just for that purpose. In no case will it meet all their hop needs, but it will be a great story to tell, that they’re using at least some hops that they’ve grown themselves. Plus, many of the brewers I’ve talked to think it will be fun (though they know it’s hard work) and just want to see if they can do it themselves and outside the ideal climate of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Hops did used to be most prevalent in upstate New York until the mid-1800s when a blight wiped out the entire industry there, so we know there are other climates where it will grow effectively. Curiously, at least two people told me they tried to get some help from the Hop Growers of America, a trade group that represents hop farmers in the tri-state area, but were soundly rebuffed. Their website states they “represent and promote the interests of U.S. growers” but dig a little deeper and you’ll see that’s not exactly accurate. Under “Growing Regions,” itself under “U.S. Hops,” the area even shown are the same three states of the Pacific Northwest Hop Growing Region. Since I know there are other hop farms — albeit quite small — around the country, when I inquired about those I was essentially told they were too small to matter.

This is one of those curious examples of how related, but competing, interests can diverge. It’s in the best interests of brewers to have a steady supply of all the hop varieties they want to use for an affordable price. I should probably say “lowest” price, but I believe most, if not all, brewers do sincerely understand and accept that hop farmers deserve a fair price. But, of course, the best interests of hop farmers is to get the best fair price they can and maximize the amount they can realize for their crops, usually on a per acre basis. The point of divergence often comes when trying to define what constitutes a price that’s “fair.” But you can also easily see why they would view any new hop farmer — no matter how small — as competition, especially outside the four main growing areas in the three typical Pacific Northwest states. And so they would be protectionist, and would not be willing to assist in their own demise or dilution of market share. I get that. But it is still a little disappointing that they wouldn’t be willing to help out a brewer growing such a small amount that it can’t be reasonably seen to be serious competition.

My friend Ralph Olson, who owns HopUnion, is quoted at the end of the Wall Street Journal piece warning that many of the new crop of hop farmers “won’t be in business in a few years. Prices will come down, and insects can wreak havoc.” And I think that’s essentially true. From everything I’ve learned talking with hop farmers and visiting the hop growing areas, hops is a difficult business that requires more effort than other kinds of farming. The processing equipment is capital intensive and dealing with potential pests and diseases a veritable nightmare. Many of the current hop growers are third or fourth generation, farming the same land as their ancestors. They say that hops gets in your blood and that is what keeps them in the game. Seeing what’s involved, I believe them.

But I also believe that the craft beer brewers got a little spooked by this last shortage, coming somewhat unexpectedly at a time when they were riding high on several years of double-digit growth. I myself had that sinking feeling when just as things seemed to be going so great for the industry, it appeared that the hop shortage/price increases might bring that growth to a screeching halt. Some brewers felt that the people who sell hops could have done a better job last year (and even before that) of managing the supply and the pricing and should have done more to warn the industry about the impending shortages. After the shortages revealed themselves, they encouraged every brewer to enter into long term contracts to ensure their price and supply, but prior to that time some brewers were unable to get a hop contract at any price.

Again, what I think we’re seeing here is competing interests, normally symbiotic, but occasionally — like now — less so. According to August 1st estimates, it appears this year’s harvest will be up 27% over last year. I haven’t seen that broken down by varieties yet, but most of the new acreage planted was the high alphas preferred by the large breweries rather than the diverse aroma hops that craft brewers need. So even with what appears to be good news overall, I expect that there will be some hop varieties still scarce and that prices won’t drop much, if at all.

But as long as there are still opportunities to make a living growing hops, we’ll see people try their hand at it. We can embrace them, as most brewers have done, or discourage them, like it would appear the hop growers, or at least the trade group that speaks for them, has done. While I can’t fault them for wanting to protect themselves and their market, especially those that have stuck with it during the lean times, it still strikes me as a somewhat bitter response. It will be interesting to see how many breweries make their beer with hops from unusual sources this fall, though in truth any hops planted for the first time last spring will not be at full yield (that takes three years). But with necessity being the mother of invention, I’m sure we’ll see a lot of creative innovation nonetheless.

Hops just before harvest time in Yakima, Washington, where over 70% of American hops are grown.

Stone Brewing released two new beers this Labor Day weekend at the brewery, and they’ll be in stores beginning Tuesday. Both sound pretty interesting. The first is Cali-Belgique IPA. It’s a California-style IPA brewed with Belgian yeast. It will be available year round, but in limited amounts.

The second release is a collaboration called AleSmith • Mikkeller • Stone Belgian Style Triple Ale. There’s a great story on the back of the bottle written by Mikkel Bjergsø, one of the three brewers involved in creating the beer. He’s the co-founder of Mikkeller, a great microbrewery in Denmark. In addition to Stone, the other brewery involved was Alesmith Brewing in San Diego. It’s a one-time beer and will be available only once. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

After Friday night’s Slow Food Nation Press Preview, the main events began Saturday morning, with two sessions scheduled for the day, and two more on Sunday. I volunteered to pour beer and answer questions in the beer pavilion and Beer Curator — don’t you just love that title — Dave McLean assigned me to the cask bar, one of three area in the beer pavilion. There was a bar for bottled and canned beer, one for draft beer, and the third for cask.

After Friday night’s Slow Food Nation Press Preview, the main events began Saturday morning, with two sessions scheduled for the day, and two more on Sunday. I volunteered to pour beer and answer questions in the beer pavilion and Beer Curator — don’t you just love that title — Dave McLean assigned me to the cask bar, one of three area in the beer pavilion. There was a bar for bottled and canned beer, one for draft beer, and the third for cask.

Once people starting arriving, the time just whizzed by, it was so different from the typical beer festival. First of all, there were very few frat boy types looking only to get a buzz. And even better, the majority of people who bellied up to the cask bar were actually interested in learning what cask beer was and which one they should try. It was so refreshing to have people truly receptive and open-minded, but perhaps the most fun was trying to pick a beer for someone, based on what they normally liked.

Me and Arne Johnson, head brewer at Marin Brewing, manning the cask bar in the beer pavilion.

Inside the main building that housed most of the 16 taste pavilions (beer, bread and native foods were outside by the entrance).

For more photos from the first Slow Food Nation convention in San Francisco, visit the photo gallery.
 

Just before the start of Slow Food Nation’s inaugural convention in San Francisco, the Beer Chef Bruce Paton put on a beer dinner with the beers of Stone Brewing. Co-founder Greg Koch was on hand to talk about his beers and enjoy the evening. As usual, a great time was had by all.

Greg Koch and Bruce Paton, toasting the evening’s meal with a yummy beer.

For more photos from Stone Brewing Beer Dinner at the Cathedral Hill Hotel, visit the photo gallery.
 

One year ago today, I was in Yakima, Washington attending Hop School. For some reason I couldn’t sleep and woke up early. I checked my e-mail and learned that Michael Jackson had passed away the night before. The beer world was stunned, myself included, and it was in a sense a national day of mourning within our community. It’s a year later, and I think that’s still true for those of us who knew Michael. I was at a wedding reception recently with some fellow beer writers and we drank a toast to his memory there, too.

So today I’ll be Remembering Michael Jackson and the legacy, influence and inspiration he left behind.

I’m volunteering at the Slow Food Nation Beer Pavilion all day today, which will afford me many opportunities to drink a toast to Michael’s memory. No matter where you are today, I’ hope you’ll do likewise.

The photos of Michael Jackson below are from the Celebrator Beer News’ own Michael Jackson Remembered page and please also visit The Beer Hunter, Michael’s “official” website.

Some early promotional shots and the last one at an event with Charles Finkel.

Slow Food Nation is a celebration of American food and sustainability. It’s a part of the international Slow Food organization as well as a subsidiary of Slow Food USA. This is the first year for the event, and it’s taking place in San Francisco. There are four sessions in the Taste Pavilions tomorrow and Sunday. Earlier tonight, there was a press and media preview. The whole event was quite impressive, especially the Beer Pavilion put together by Beer Curator Dave McLean, owner of Magnolia, where they were serving 150 beers from 60 breweries on cask, draft and in bottles.

There are four bars like this one, made of beer bottles and the bar top is made from recycled beer bottle glass.

Dave McLean, the Beer Curator for Slow Food Nation, looking pleased with his creation.

For many more photos from the inaugural Slow Food Nation Beer Pavilion, visit the photo gallery.
 

In 2007, Mike McDole was one of the three winners of the Longshot homebrewing contest, sponsored by Boston Beer. He won for his Imperial IPA — an homage to Russian River’s Pliny the Elder — and was set to have it bottled when the hop shortage hit. Unfortunately, because his style called for a lot of scarce and expensive hops, the bottling of Mike’s beer was postponed. Hopefully, we’ll see bottles of it soon.

Meanwhile, Mike is also involved in the Brewers Association’s Pro-Am Homebrew Competition, where a commercial brewer will make a homebrewer’s award-winning recipe and that’s then entered in a special GABF judging contest. He was set to brew this week at Russian River Brewing, but Vinnie’s fermenter space got unexpectedly all tied up and he ended up at 21st Amendment, brewing his newest creation dubbed “Tasty,” an American IPA Mike describes as “Pliny light.”

Mike McDole and Shaun O’Sullivan, brewing together at 21st Amendment Brewery.

Recently, over 120 college and university presidents called on Congress to “consider” lower the drinking age from 21 to 18. The Amethyst Initiative is the brainchild of John McCardell, President Emeritus of Middlebury College, who’s also the founder of Choose Responsibility. Actually, the initiative doesn’t advocate lowering the drinking age per se, but does instead ask that the debate over doing so be open and robust, something it has not been in a long time. The neo-prohibitionists, of course, are apoplectic after so many years of bullying lawmakers with little or no dissent allowed. Nearly 25 years after the age was increased nationally (at least that was the effect of tying the age to federal highway funds), many people are questioning the laws’ effectiveness. More troubling for the anti-alcohol advocates is that many of the people asking for the debate are not as easily dismissed and controlled as in the past.

As a result, we’re seeing increased efforts on the part of anti-alcohol organizations to spread fear, skewed statistics and propaganda. Case in point is an editorial by a media-savvy M.D., Darshak Sanghavi, whose recent hit piece in Slate, Quicker Liquor, Should we lower the legal drinking age? , begins reasonably enough but quickly goes off the rails revealing itself as more churlish propaganda.

What initially makes my blood boil about such propaganda from the medical community is that it disguises opinion as fact. His article is essentially an op-ed piece but with the column’s subtitle as “Health and Medicine Explained” and his imprimatur of “Medical Examiner” it sounds like the doctor is dispensing well-settled facts instead of what it is in reality, well-crafted use of scary sounding statistics that add up to nothing more than neo-prohibitionist propaganda. Ever since my son’s autism diagnosis, my faith in the medical community has sank like a stone. I no longer automatically trust that doctors are more concerned about their patients than themselves. You expect trade organizations for various industries to consider their interests of paramount importance and above all other considerations. But for some reason, we don’t expect organizations of doctors and the like to be as selfishly single-minded. But of course they are, because they’re human just like you and me. They care about their own families, their careers, and themselves no less they anyone else. And so medical organizations today make pronouncements that sound like they’re good for us, but in reality are often in the interests of the medical community instead.

So when Dr. Sanghavi uses phrases like “in truth” he’s really imparting opinion, citing specific studies that support his agenda. Alcohol advocates could cite equally reputable studies that say just the opposite. Lying with statistics is nothing new—though the science of how do it is getting more sophisticated—and so much of any study has to do with its methodology, its framing and the sample. That’s true on both sides, I freely admit, but again because Dr. Sanghavi has “Dr.” in front of his name and I have “Mr.,” the general public will tend to believe him over me every time, regardless of which one of us makes the stronger case. And with what’s essentially a public policy question and not an issue of medical fact, that strikes me as an underhanded tactic. But when he compares anyone advocating lowering the drinking age to drug addicts, it’s clear the gloves have come off.

Sanghavi goes on to cite scary statistic after scary statistic, but after saying how wonderful raising the drinking age has been for society concludes that binge drinking is still rising alarmingly. Hmm? How can that be? He also concedes that education does work, yet that also contradicts his assertion that other countries with more permissive drinking laws—where often drinking begins at home with education—don’t have lower binging levels. Hmm?

His solution naturally is the time-honored suggestion that everyone else who’s over 21 and who drinks responsibly should shoulder the expense by paying more for their beer. I’m not going to debate where beer taxes should be relative to other products, but the notion that making them more expensive for minors to buy is a reasonable solution, is patently ridiculous, especially as it punishes everybody else. Again, beer is singled out because it’s the “preferred choice of underage drinkers.” Not so fast, doc. As I wrote about last week, a recent CASA survey of teens age 12-17 showed a very clear preference not for beer, but hard alcohol sweetened with something else. Beer’s preference in the survey exactly equaled that of wine, at only 16%. But beer as the bogeyman in the neo-prohibitionist playbook is such a staple of the cause that I suspect it’s very difficult for them to shift gears, even as their own evidence contradicts their arguments.

But as for raising taxes, and by extension prices overall, from the point of view of people who clearly hate alcohol, I guess they figure it doesn’t matter if the rest of society suffers. He compares this position to chemotherapy: it “can’t cure terminal cancer, but it can make patients hurt a little less and perhaps survive a little longer.” Sanghavi adds that therefore since “the current drinking age undeniably reduces teen binge-drinking,” we should keep 21 the minimum age. Yet just a few paragraphs before he says the following.

There are more binge drinkers on campuses today. Among college students, the percentage of “frequent-heavy” drinkers remained stable from 1977-89, at about 30 percent. However, bingeing began increasing steadily throughout the late 1990s, long after the legal age was increased.

So which is it? Does the current drinking age reduce binge-drinking as he concludes or not, as he emphatically states earlier?

But his conclusion also included this bit of wisdom. “Of course, in the end a lot of teens will binge-drink, no matter what the law says. But that’s not an argument against making the legal age 21 years old to buy and consume it.” Actually, I’d say that’s exactly what it is. It’s clear that at 21 it’s not working in the way anyone intended. That’s the very point 128 college and university presidents are trying to make, that current policy needs a radical change. Even Candy Lightner, the founder of MADD—who Sanghavi cites—believes that she may have been wrong and in any case believes the organization she started has veered far from its original and intended purpose. If the age of consent were lower, say where the most of the rest of the civilized world sets it, at 18, and laws were amended to allow alcohol education in both the home and in school, dramatic results may indeed be possible.

But such reasonable thinking is, in the end, not what Sanghavi will tolerate, calling such ideas “snake oil” and the people who suggest them “peddlers.” But he’s the medicine man dispensing propaganda. Using the status of a medical doctorate to lend authority to an argument of public policy; now that’s deceptive salesmanship.

I got this earlier this morning from Oskar Blues Brewing, a fitting bit of humor given today the Democratic National Convention begins in Denver, Colorado.