Those of us who have been writing about and/or closely following the craft beer industry for any length of time are often left exasperated by the mainstream media’s coverage of beer. If they cover beer at all, the number of amateurish mistakes that are made are legion. In fact, I’d go so far as to say mainstream beer coverage contains more errors than correct information. It’s that bad most of the time. They sometimes do more harm than good because spreading bad information is sometimes worse than ignoring us entirely. There are exceptions, I know, but they are just that: exceptions to the rule. Usually mainsream media outlets, again if they write about beer at all, tap one of their food or wine writers. Occasionally, that writer cares about about beer or even — dare I say it — likes the stuff. But not usually. More often they feel as if they’re being punished for some other misdeed, as if pulling beer duty is akin to being sent to a kind of literary Siberia. And more often than not the writing reflects that. It drives us more than a little nuts. When beer writers get together at events it’s usually the number two subject (number one is the location of the free food) that’s discussed time and time again. Tom Dalldorf, publisher of the Celebrator, and I have talked endlessly about this problem. Lew Bryson recently ranted nicely about it in his monthly Buzz column.

Don’t expect anything that broad here, I just read something that got me pissed off again and it started me thinking about this subject again. It was by an AP business writer by the name of Libby Quaid. A quick search reveals she writes about a disparate range of subjects from beef and madcow disease to Condeleeza Rice rebutting Colin Powell. The piece that got me going is called “Once-flat beer sales beginning to revive” and in it she’s billed as, of all things, an “AP Food and Farm Writer,” whatever that means. Apparently it means she doesn’t know anything meaningful about beer.

The gist of her story is that beer sales have “gone flat” but are now trending up again. But by “beer sales” she actually means beer sales from the large breweries since craft beer sales have had good positive growth over at least the last two years.

She begins:

Beer sales had gone flat, while wine was flying off the shelves. So beer makers decided to steal a page from wine’s marketing manual and create new packaging, flavors and drinks. Now beer is coming back.

While beer is still preferred by more than half of all Americans, wine and spirits drinkers have been increasing. This is happening, our esteemed food and farm writer tells us, because, as she puts it, “[b]asically, wine seemed to have gotten more fun.” Now I like wine. I drink it reasonably often. And I’ve been to organized wine tastings, wine festivals, and commercial wine competitions. But they are all quiet, serious affairs compared with even the average beer festival. Saying wine is more “fun” than beer can only be said with a straight face by someone who does not really know what good beer culture is and has the potential to be. I just spent the weekend camping at a brewery with hundreds of brewery people and their families, drinking, eating, talking, laughing, playing disc golf, and enjoying the sunshine outdoors. Down the road at the several Anderson Valley wineries that dot the area you could probably hear actual crickets chirping, it was that quiet by comparison. Now I realize she’s talking about just the big guys again, but that also means she’s missing the whole picture. She’s talking about three breweries and ignoring what’s going on at fourteen hundred of the rest of the breweries across the country.

Oh, and I think she defines “fun” as “cute critters on the label, easy-open screwcaps and cans and party-friendly boxes.” My mistake, at first I thought she meant actual fun, not that kind of fun. Even so, a walk down any decent beer aisle and you’ll see that beer labels have been defining that kind of fun for years, too.

But then she contradicts herself again, saying:

For beer, new packaging includes Heineken’s keg can for the fridge, which gives people draft beer at home. Coors sells a cooler box with 18-ounce plastic bottles that is ready to be filled with ice and taken to the beach or a barbecue. And Budweiser comes in new sturdy aluminum bottles that are like a cross between a can and a glass bottle.

So even under her strained definition of packaging as fun, beer is “fun,” too. Although Heineken’s keg can has been around for years, maybe even a decade, and doesn’t give anyone anything near “draft at home.” It’s the same horrible beer they sell in a regular can or bottle.

Ms. Quaid continues. “Beyond packaging is flavor.” Really? How astute. But wait, it gets better. “For Anheuser-Busch, maker of Budweiser, that means Bud Select, a light beer with a more robust taste.” Stop, I’m laughing too hard now. Bud Select … robust taste … ha ha ha …. If that’s what passes for robust flavor kill me now.

My point is that this so-called journalism is so bad that it paints a completely distorted picture of an entire industry. The author may know business. She may know the food industry. She may even know a little about the big breweries. But she appears to know absolutely nothing about beer. Now perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh. Perhaps she didn’t ask for this assignment and did the best she could. Perhaps. But if this is the best the Associated Press could muster then I weep for the state of journalism today. Of course, I do that almost every day anyway.

But is it really too much to ask that our mainstream media pay even some attention to what more than half of their readers drink? And when they do deign to cover it that they do so with at least a modicum of accuracy. But most newspaper people will tell you that beer drinkers don’t read newspapers. Wine people do. So that’s the general reason given for why beer gets such short shrift. Because they’re bowing to what their readers want. In their mind, people want to read about wine but don’t want to read about beer. It reflects the same general prejudice that beer is not worthy of study, that it is inferior to wine or that it has no story to tell. Once upon a time, people thought the same thing about American wine. When small wineries in Napa and Sonoma counties began making world class wines, the press took up their cause is still talking about it today. When the same thing happened with beer beginning in the early 1980s, the press did cover what they then called the microbrewery revolution. But for reasons I’ve never understood they abruptly stopped, as if it was a novelty or fad whose time had passed. Of course, while they weren’t paying attention craft beer continued to grow in size, quality and prestige. Small American breweries today make some of the finest beers in the world and have the international medals to prove it. Yet nowadays, getting a newspaper or television station to regularly, consistently, fairly and accurately cover beer is as rare as a 1968 vintage bottle of Thomas Hardy’s Ale. If our mainstream media cared about beer even a fraction of the way they feel about wine, then more people would know how rare that is.

vs.

It was reported that “on Wednesday, Miller paid for an airplane to tow a banner over Anheuser-Busch’s St. Louis headquarters that read, ‘Sire, sire pants on fire.'” That was the same day a front page Wall Street Journal article appeared in which Anheuser-Busch finally admitted making changes to the formulas for their two most popular products, Budweiser and Bud Light. I just love the idea of this public fracas between the two big American brewing giants devolving to the level of a schoolyard fight. Obviously, Anheuser-Busch has long played the role of bully in this fight and bitter rival (pun intended) SABMiller wasted no time in all but using the “L” word in about as public a way as I can imagine. I presume “sire” is a reference to A-B’s vainglorious claim that they are the king of beers. But it’s still a little odd that Miller didn’t go the extra step to use the “L” word, though of course it was undeniably implied. My only regret is that I haven’t been able to find any photos of the plane flying over the brewery. Surely somebody must have taken a picture of so odd a sight as that.

Two days later Miller ran a full-page ad in USA Today claiming that A-B lied (this time apprently using the “L” word) when it had continually denied that its recipes had been altered over the years.

From the article:

The newspaper story also quoted Anheuser-Busch executives as denying that any changes were made in response to increased sales over the past three years by Miller Lite, Miller Brewing’s No. 1 brand.

The issue first surfaced in November, when Miller began running three TV ads that said Miller Lite has more taste than Bud Light despite changes in Bud Light.

Anheuser-Busch said then it had not changed the beer’s formula, and it complained to TV networks about the commercials.

Miller, however, said last fall it could substantiate its claims through documented increases in “bitterness units,” which measure the amount of hop bitterness in beer.

Advertising Age on Thursday, April 27, the day after the Wall Street Journal expose, ran an article entitled Miller Moves Quickly to Exploit Rival’s Revelation, in which they report that Miller’s ad agency has been challenged to begin using the information revealed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal article as soon as possible, and perhaps as soon as Friday. Apparently Miller’s ad agency, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, was up to the challenge given the full page ad in Friday’s USA Today.

From the Ad Age article:

The Journal’s report said that, in August 2003, A-B Chairman August Busch III told hops growers in the Pacific Northwest he intended to increase the proportion of hops used in A-B’s beers in order to give the beers more taste after decades of gradually lightening their flavor to adjust to changing consumer tastes. “I told the growers of our desire to use more hops in our brewing for the purpose of delivering more amplitude and hop flavor in Budweiser,” Mr. Busch told the paper.

While brewers tweak their beers all the time, that admission provides significant marketing ammunition for Miller, the No. 2 brewer behind A-B. Miller ran ads in November 2005 saying it detected a “changed” Bud Light, citing increases in bitterness and carbonation. That attack followed a 2004 campaign by Miller claiming its beers had “more taste” than A-B’s.

Funny stuff. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

UPDATE 5.5: I finally found a photo of the banner.

Photo by Bill Stover, Associated Press

As I read the fascinating article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required to view the article) about how the flavor of Budweiser has drifted or “creeped” (as head brewmaster Doug Muhleman called it) over the years to become more bland, I was reminded of a conversation I had standing in line for food in the brewers’ lounge area at the Great American Beer Festival seven years ago. The GABF, when it was in the old building next to the new Convention Center where it’s now held, had a lounge where brewers, media and staff could go to relax and get away from the crowds. Standing in line for the free buffet lunch, in front of me, according to his badge was a brewer from Anheuser-Busch — I can no longer recall his name — and we began chatting amiably. Shortly before I’d left for Denver I’d received a gift at my office of a special 750 ml bottle of Budweiser that had been created to celebrate the millennium. My A-B chain rep. at that time explained to me that they were filled with everyday Budweiser, not a special brew to mark the occasion. So I mentioned this fact to my line buddy and asked why they didn’t do something special for the millennium bottle and I suggested they should have done a batch based on the original 1876 recipe. I’ll never forget the look on his face and what he said to me next. This brewer from Anhesuer-Busch looked me straight in the eye and said. “The Budweiser we make today is the same as it was then. We use the same recipe.” It was all I could do to not laugh in his face, because I really wasn’t trying to pick a fight. But it took a fair amount of restraint on my part not to call him on his statement.

And the reason for that is simple. No one in the beer industry believes that Budweiser today is the same as it was in 1876. Nobody. No one even thinks it’s the same now as it was at the end of World War Two. Nobody. And few people, if any, think it’s the same now as it was in the 1970s. But that’s been the party line at A-B for as long as I can remember. I recall Fred Eckhardt, a well-respected beer writer from Portland, talking about this fact in his various writings for many, many years. And I can’t recall a single conversation about this subject that came to a different conclusion over several decades. So for Anheuser-Busch to finally come clean and admit that the beer has changed feels like a vindication of the criticsms that have been leveled at them over the years.

The Wall Street Journal article states that “Anheuser[-Busch] concedes Budweiser has changed over the years. It quietly tinkered with its formula to make the beer less bitter and pungent, say several former brewmasters, a byproduct of the company’s desire to create a beer for the Everyman.” Apparently Triple Sticks, the affectionate nickname for August Busch III, in the 1980s ordered that sample bottles of A-B’s beers be cryogenically frozen, using the same method human tissue is frozen.

From the Wall Street Journal article:

Mr. Muhleman, who is officially Anheuser’s group vice president for brewing and technology, says the company didn’t set out to make the beers less bitter. He calls the change “creep,” the result of endlessly modifying the beer to allow for changes in ingredients, weather and consumer taste. “Through continuous feedback, listening to consumers, this is a change over 20, 30, 40 years,” says Mr. Muhleman, gesturing toward the row of Budweiser cans. “Over time, there is a drift.”

The five Budweiser cans in front of Mr. Busch, dating from 1982, 1988, 1993, 1998 and 2003, were pulled off the production line shortly after they were brewed. They were cooled to minus-321 degrees Fahrenheit over 16 hours and stored at that temperature in a secret laboratory in the company’s headquarters.

The sample cans demonstrate how “creep” works. The difference in taste between two beers brewed five years apart is indistinguishable. Yet, the difference between the 1982 beer and the 2003 beer is distinct. “The bones are the same. It is the same structure,” says Mr. Muhleman. Overall, however, “the beers have gotten a little less bitter.”

That may be part of it, but it sounds a bit disengenuous to me. They “listened to consumers?” How convenient that all these consumers wanted them to use less ingredients and make their beer more profitable. Because that’s the part of this “drift” that goes unmentioned. The WSJ article states that “[f]rom 1950 to 2004, the amount of malt used to brew a barrel of beer in the U.S. declined by nearly 27%, and the amount of hops in a barrel of beer declined by more than half, according to Brewers Almanac.” Well, guess what? They didn’t lower the price to reflect the use of less materials, did they? I certainly doubt it. According to the Siebel Institute: “Over the past twenty years the IBU’s of most American-style lagers has dramatically declined, from roughly 15-20 IBU’s to fewer than 10 today.”

Again, the article attributes this to outside influence, as the author writes. “Nonetheless, beer’s taste became steadily lighter.” (my emphasis.) This is driven home a second time by Graham Stewart, director of the International Centre for Brewing and Distilling at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland when he states. “The North American palate has become lighter and lighter.” (my emphasis again.) They make it sound like it just happened as if it were accidental and beyond their control. But all of their advertising emphasized the “drinkability” of their beer as one of its greatest virtues. Through the slow manipulation of their formula to use less and less ingredients and careful advertising that de-emphasized that fact over time it was A-B (and the other big breweries) that changed their customers taste, not the other way around.

And this was done for one very sound reason, from their point of view — profit. Using less ingredients lowers your per item cost and increases profitability. Making the beer lighter has one other economic advantage and is explained rather straighforwardly by the article.

Again, from the WSJ article:

One key to Budweiser’s popularity is that it produces no “palate fatigue” after several drinks. The bitterness in stronger beers tends to build up, causing a drinker to tire of the taste. Bud’s appeal is what people in the industry call “drinkability.” (In the U.K., it is called “sessionability,” for how many beers one person will drink in a session.) Budweiser tests drinkability in “pub tests” in which the brewer rents a pub or a bar and invites people to drink free. Afterward, Anheuser drives the drinkers home.

For Mr. Busch, the definition of “drinkability” is simple: “I want the next beer!” he says. “You stop drinking because you know it’s time to stop but you don’t want to: That’s drinkability.” … “We’ve been tasting these beers for 50 years,” says Mr. Busch. “If we can’t sit down and drink three or four of them, then it’s not right.”

You’ve also heard this called “poundability,” and I think this admission runs quite contrary to the “responsible drinking” campaigns they’ve been using to keep the neo-prohibitionists off their back. A-B has their Responsibility Matters at beerresponsible.com, Miller has its Responsbile Drinking print campaign and Drink Aware in the UK. And you can download their Alcohol Manifesto at the Promoting Alcohol Responsibility section of the SABMiller website, and Coors‘ website has its own alcohol responsibility section. The point is that despite their hollow attempts at telling people to drink responsibly, a direct result of making their beer lighter is that people will drink more of it thus increasing sales. This is not so much a by-product as a carefully designed and predictable outcome of increasing “drinkability.” I love Busch’s own definition, which implies that if people stop drinking when they know they should stop then the Budweiser brewers haven’t done their job. How responsible is that?

According to the article, this strategy may finally be starting to backfire as craft beer has been showing consistent positive growth over the last few years. “As a result, rivals and some industry analysts blame Anheuser’s recent lackluster financial performance on the very foundation of Budweiser dominance: its light, bubbly formula, which has been mocked for years by beer snobs and beer drinkers outside the U.S.” So the economic indicators seem to be that people might actually be starting to demand that their beer have actual flavor. “I think you’re seeing an increased consumer acceptance that bitter is a positive characteristic in beer,” says Keith Lemke, vice president of the Siebel Institute. Another side benefit of craft beer, according to the big breweries’ logic (and one which should be embraced by the neo-prohibitionists), is that they claim craft beers’ strong flavors will create palate fatigue which lead to increased responsibility. This is because these full flavors will then cause people to drink less beer. That means that craft beer by its very nature is the better choice because it all but guarantees more responsible drinking. I realize it doesn’t actually really work that way, but it is a logical conclusion from A-B’s assertions. And I like the idea that from their own analysis craft beer is the best choice for drinking responsibly.

The article ends with a delightful coda from Abita Brewing’s president, David Blossom:

Many smaller brewers in the industry scoff at the idea there’s any difference between the two beers. “I sit back and chuckle at them going after each other,” says David Blossman, president of microbrewery Abita Brewing Co. in Abita Springs, La., which makes brands such as Purple Haze and Turbodog. “It’s like comparing Bunny Bread to Wonder Bread.”

And that’s an excellent observation, I think. We’re witnessing two giants duke it out over who has the better marketing claims. American-style lagers and American-style light lagers are all but indistinguishable from one another. So who wins the sales contest comes down to one thing: marketing. And how successful their marketing efforts have thus far been in misinforming their consumers about what beer is may be the saddest legacy of all.

There’s been talk in the air for months regarding Anheuser-Busch approaching regional craft brewers about aligning themselves with them in some fashion — either by purchasing or other distribution arrangements — and many, many names have been dropped as being potential targets. Most have proved unfounded and because of this I’ve been careful not to name any rumored names. Even so, I’ve gotten several e-mails from friends in breweries letting me know they’re definitely not in negotiations with A-B, which has been appreciated. It’s nice to able to whittle down the list. But several names have persisted and even a few of them have been seen in print. So it was no surprise that more definite rumors abounded at the Craft Brewers Conference last week about which craft brewers might be joining Anheuser-Busch’s Craft Brewers Alliance.

Current members include Redhook and Widmer Brothers. The distribution deal, which is rumored to include a small percentage of ownership by A-B tied to performance standards, has worked wonders for Widmer and their business has grown quite dramatically. Redhook, on the hand, has not fared as well. As I understand it, they did not meet performance goals and as a result A-B exerts greater control over them now then before and owns a greater percentage of the Seattle-based company. I don’t know the actual specifics — does anybody? — but it’s something like that.

Three names kept coming up last week as having signed deals or being close to closing a deal with A-B to join the Craft Brewers Alliance. I want to stress that the exact nature of the deal, if any, is strictly rumor at this point. Though several people I spoke to seem to have it on good authority that this is what is happening. The three breweries consistently mentioned are Firestone Walker Fine Ales of Paso Robles, California, Goose Island Brewing of Chicago, Illinois and Kona Brewing of Hawaii. If true, that would make the CBA five fairly large and prominent breweries. For those breweries it would mean increased distribution nationally. For other craft brewers, especially those currently being distrubuted by A-B distributors, it could spell disaster. If your distributor has five reasonably popular craft brands with a variety of styles that they’re effectively bound by contract to focus on, then the amount of attention other brands will get will certainly be less, assuming they even keep those other brands. There will likely be additional pressure for the distributors to have “100% share of mind,” the name of A-B’s wholesaler exclusivity program, and that will likely result in many A-B houses dropping smaller, local brands in order to accomodate the new CBA brands.

Rich Tucciarone, Director of Brewery Operations for Kona, did confirm that they have had in place for some time now several distribution only agreements in a few states for Bud distributors to carry their products but that no new negotiations or deals have taken place in recent months. From what he told me, this is only new insofar as people are talking about it again and examining relationships between craft brewers and A-B houses involved in distrubting their product.

I wasn’t able to speak with Matt Brynildson, Firestone Walker’s brewmaster, because I only saw him accepting his awards at CBC. I did, however, talk with Mark Cabrera, an old friend and Northern California Sales Manager for Firestone Walker. He told me the rumors are patently untrue. Firestone Walker has, he mentioned, recently switched distributors in southern California to include exclusively A-B houses which may have fueled speculation. But, he assured me, Adam Firestone, though certainly approached, rebuffed A-B’s advances.

Goose Island, on the other hand, does appear to at least be in talks with A-B. As long ago as last December, the Chicago Tribune reported as much. As mentioned in Stan Hieronymus’ Beer Therapy “Goose Island president and founder John Hall confirmed as much, but said discussions have been limited to ‘distribution issues.’ He declined to comment further on the nature of the talks.” I saw Will Turner, who’s a Bay Area brewer who now brews for Goose Island, at CBC but I didn’t get a chance to ask him about this.

Every person I did talk to about this had a certain wearines in their voice, like they’d grown quite tired of talking about this and refuting the rumors. And that makes sense, there’s few things more damaging or harder to defend than an unfounded rumor. They’re a lot like viruses. No one can pinpoint where they started and they’re pretty hard to kill. So it seems that these recent round of rumors amount to virtually nothing, unfortunately, so we really still don’t know exactly what’s going on, who’s making deals, and what the deals are. Until that happens, all we can really do is wonder, speculate and worry.