The future will not be like the past. Everything that grows matures, for the better or for the worse. Craft brewing is maturing as an industry while the constituent brewers that comprise it also mature. Many, most actually, are still new born given that something like 1.5+ breweries have been opening every single day of the week since 2013. When Lagunitas was born there were a few dozen brewers in all of California. Today there are nearly 400 and most are still very young. Craft as an idea is growing and maturing and it seems it is disconcerting to many. The Craft Brew selection in your neighborhood store in the future will present the wares of brewers who are very, very big and very, very small shoulder to shoulder on the same shelf. The largest Crafter in the U.S. with a market capitalization somewhere over $3 billion even now wants to be seen in the same light as the smallest who opened just last week and works to scrape together enough dinero to make payroll and still pay for malt and hops, rent and taxes. Why not, right?
The Brewers Association doesn’t help things much by moving the pretty term ‘Craft’ toward meaninglessness by modifying it every couple of years to accommodate this or allow for that. The ‘Craft vs Crafty’ thing from last summer was another nail in the term’s coffin. Exclusion and inclusion by fiat has a frat party sort of aroma to it and it gave the folks they’d like to exclude a stage to stand on to offer their own definition, and so it spins. I’ve said a few times already that Craft is like porn: You know it when you see it (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 1964). For the record, it was my insightful Uber-Cicerone brother-in-law who introduced that term to the BA years ago when the then-term ‘Microbrewery’ became equally meaningless. What does that tiny factoid tell you? It tells me that Small Brewing is not a thing at all but rather a point on a curve. It is a revolution, which indicates movement, which in turn suggests evolution with the passage of time.
We’ve been intimately involved in Craft since 1992 and brewing within its ivy-covered confines since the fall of 1993 and I can tell you that Craft of 1993 would be unrecognizable to a Craft fan from 2015. It was sparsely populated and offerings on the extreme side were mostly malty and in the 7.5% abv range. We made a fall seasonal that we called The Lagunator Ale that was our malty-ish amber ale run up to 7.75% and only a scarce few bars in San Francisco or Sonoma County would even put it on tap complaining that it would ‘cut down on consumption’ and that they ‘didn’t want the trouble’ that the hi-test brew would engender. We followed that brew up with another, The Hairy Eyeball Ale at 10%, and soldiered on. The industry of 1998 would be equally unrecognizable. Six packs of the most popular stuff were $6.99 and almost always on sale for $4.99. There were no 12-packs at all. We and some cool brewpubs were about the only ones filling 22oz bottles for a long while. I was buying fermenters for pennies on the dollar from garage sales and every type of brewing equipment was being liquidated by equipment brokers all over. Need hops? Sure! All varieties. How much do you want? How much do you want to pay? Things were different.
The beers you’d find, besides our IPA and MAXIMUS and Cappuccino Stout, were almost entirely mild hefeweizens, fruit beers, red ales, golden ales, lagers, porters, and the occasional oatmeal stout (Ken Allen was another pirate). Budweiser was actually paying their distributors big money to drop craft brands from their books, they called it the ‘100% Share-of-Mind Program’. There were some other brewers making beers of the future along with us but the landscape was fundamentally different because Beer Lovers were still trying to figure out what they wanted and smart Brewers were following their lead. By 2001 the world of today was being born in some circles, but the availability was almost nil, it was just a different place. So then, where to from here? Forward, right? Never straight.
When we brewers were all smaller we all had a lot more in common. Today, quality and excitement in the glass is still the common denominator but the numerator ranges from 4 million barrels all the way down to a few hundred. From self-distribution with a singe pick-up truck to networks that span oceans. The smallest buy pre-milled malt by the bagful from a local warehouse and we contract for it hundreds of acres at a time in another country.
I kinda see five fundamentally distinct industries now, each with seriously different needs and hopes and wants. None of this addresses the crazy possibilities of beer styles because anyone in any tier can quickly adopt a break-out style from any other tier. This has to do with the effects of the nature of scale on the brewer. The five are: The first tier, 750k barrels and up. The fast-developing second tier 100k - 750k. Packaging brewers below 100k. The truly small guys, and then the BrewPubs. I see those particular groupings as meaningful from what I know of how the business itself changes from my own experience at those very different levels. It’s back to the first sentence about maturing and changing. It’s natural and necessary, difficult and beautiful too.
The thing is that Junior High School Kids and High School Seniors don’t really want the same things, they do kinda, but mostly not. They have different needs and different problems to solve in order to find their way. But in Craft we are all on the same playground together, understood by Beer Lovers simply by the beer we brew. Or worse; as bully and underdog, winner and loser, antagonist and protagonist. In this paradigm, misunderstandings occur. I think I have a unique perspective given how quickly Lagunitas has grown from the third tier into the first. It’s been a great and gratifying experience in so many ways, the learning curve has been steep, but we have learned. Now imagine that junior high school kid suddenly getting promoted five grades and appearing suddenly in the midst of the Big Kids. One clearly remembers where they’d come from because it was only yesterday and the rush down the corridor into the new Big Kids Classroom is pretty vivid too, and in general The Big Kids don’t think it’s all that cool either. They don’t think that little kid is worthy of their august ranks.
All of the socialization aside, the interesting thing is that when growing through the woods so quickly one can clearly remember the differences and sees the landscape without the benefit of a gradual transition into the new space. That gradual thing helps to make things blur together a little bit and rationalizes the dichotomies. In some ways growing up slowly has its benefits, like acclimatization. I a read yesterday on Reddit where someone commented that I am a polarizing figure. If that’s a true statement it comes from that perspective of seeing the whole space from small to first tier in such a short time. One could begin a westward hike out of Maryland in May eventually arriving in Denver by Fall and never internalize the reality of the situation; that with each westward step the calendar also moves the landscape’s character toward another season all together. It would yield a very different and blurred experience of each place than if one boarded a plane in that Old Line State at 8am and landed DIA at 10am- Only then would one accurately perceive the flavor of the alien landscape, the texture of mountain air, the quality of the sky, the nature of the people.
That’s how it’s been for us and it’s been intense. I liked the freedom of pre-adolescence and I also like the ‘ability’ of maturity. I’ll hang onto the best of both and that’ll always make us a bit of an outlier, maybe polarizing. But like I said above, the common denominator is still quality and excitement in the glass, and that’s the ultimate boss, and I do still like the boss. Everything that grows matures, for the better or for the worse. Craft brewing is maturing as an industry and the constituent brewers that comprise it are also maturing. The future will not be like the past.
Chairs..!
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