Category: Beer in America

The Craft Beer Movement: Insider or Outsider?

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“I can’t believe I became part of this movement,” I said to Hannah as we sat on the couch watching TV one lazy post-work day. I continued, “Of all the things I could’ve gotten into, it never ceases to amaze me that I got into something that is actually now a thing.” How did I know that craft beer and home-brewing were going to become as big as they are? How did I know that my love for craft beer would grow into something much more, something bordering on obsession?

The truth is, I didn’t know, but now that it has become this thing in my life I’m grateful. And I can’t help but think my own involvement helped spur the movement along. I like to think that my research and involvement helped it grow, in my own small way, as I immersed myself into craft beer culture throughout and after college. But maybe I didn’t. In 2007, craft beer was already a thing, home brewing was already a popular pastime, enjoyed by middle aged men everywhere, Minnesota already had several cart breweries and more in the works. I was just another supporter, standing watch as craft beer exploded in my face.

But Surly Brewing didn’t really open until 2006. It didn’t really become popular until the following year when it entered the main stream. It was no longer for bicyclists and beer geeks, it was for the people. People like me. Which makes me wonder, if there weren’t people like me, where would the craft beer industry be? I’m just a fangirl, going to beer fests, pretending I know more than others and that I have some claim to the movement, a little piece of the MN faction.

I could have picked anything else to devote my time to, to become my hobby or pet interest and cause in life. In the past I cared about more important things like HIV in subsaharan Africa, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, corporate social responsibility; not that I don’t care about these things anymore because I do, I just don’t blog about them. I don’t think about them on a daily basis. I don’t drink them. I don’t consume them. That’s what draws me to beer and craft beer culture. It’s more than a drink, a theory, or a product, it’s a way of life. It’s a way of life I share with many others, that gets me excited when I meet a kindred spirit who likes what I like and drinks what I drink, it’s my own little club that I can choose to share with others, and when I do, it’s oh so meaningful.

But then I meet people who are part of the movement who I don’t like: the middle aged man who loves craft beer and wants to financially support a brewery but who thinks I’m nothing more than a little girl who’s interest in craft beer is “cute.” We are not kindred spirit, we are not in the same microculture. He is everything that is wrong with the movement, elitist and demoralizing. And what about the beer snob, someone worse than me, who insists my favorite craft beer is not worthy of such title, and has plans to start the next new local microbrewery? I am them from from years past, small and stupid, my tastes unrefined and my knowledge sub-par. He is everything that is wrong with the movement, superior and disrespectful.

And then there’s me, for I too am at fault. With my knowledge I too alienate people, haughtily explaining why a room temp pint glass is better for beer than the frosty mug they grew up drinking from, scoffing at the only “local” beer on the menu at a fancy restaurant in Iowa: Leinenkugels. Have I gone too far inside the movement such that everyone else is an outsider? Such that anyone else who wants to be part of the movement, can’t be, or isn’t good enough to be?

That’s not what it’s all about, and that’s not the way to keep the movement growing and changing. That’s what keeps it stale and stagnant, the same old people making the same old beer because they know best, they know the most, they have the most at stake. Thinking that your thoughts and opinions dont matter because you just dont understand. It’s not your way of life.

In the most recent issue of the Beer Advocate magazine, on the list for what to expect in 2013 is “a stronger backlash toward those who take themselves and craft beer too seriously.” Truth. Beer is for fun, beer is for drinking, and sometimes we just need to shut the hell up and enjoy a cold one, whatever glass it comes in. So this is my goal as we move into 2013: enjoy craft beer. Love craft beer. Share the love, don’t hoard it or save it for insiders like yourself. Support knowledge and the quest for knowledge so that other people too can claim the movement for their own because it is also theirs. It is a cause worth caring about, but first people have to learn and embrace why it’s worth caring about to begin with and they can only do that if the movement is open and caring of them too.

Happy New Year and cheers to 2013!

Livin’ the American Dream: Opening a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Brewery

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Every homebrewer dreams of one day taking their hobby one step further and living the American dream: becoming a craft brewing hero. It just seems like the logical next step, you’ve been brewing for x number of years and what else is there to do next? Sell your beer, hear compliments form the masses, grow even bigger, supply the United States with your beer and your love of beer. And why not? Everyone keeps telling you it’s wonderful and they would definitely pay for it at a bar, it’s legit, so you should open your own brewery already!

But anyone who knows anything about the craft beer industry knows how hard it is to open a microbrewery, much less a tap room or figure out how to convince distributers to sell said beer.  It’s much more complicated than the simple dream of artfully crafting the best tasting beer – which many of us believe we are already doing. But everything tells us how easy it is, the sheer number of breweries opening up makes us think, “Hey, if they can do it, so can I!” but it’s hard. Really hard. Work you to the bone and cry every night because you’re not sure if you’re going to make it hard. But once you do, you’re guaranteed to be as cool as Omar, and don’t we all want to be as cool as Omar? He’s the owner of Surly, in case you’re not in the know. It’s time to stop admiring the modern art and saying, “Oh, I could do that,” when in reality we probably couldn’t, but we want to so bad. It’s time to put our money where our mouths are. Literally. Shit is expensive.

But having said all that, the dream still lives on, even in me – especially in me. We as homebrewers and craft beer lovers can’t help but think about what could be; because we constantly surround ourselves with and support other microbreweries that grew up out of the same dream, like surrogate children, we love them, and secretly or not so secretly long for one of our own.

One day, I want to open my own microbrewery, or nanobrewery, or brewpub – I’d even settle for liquor store. And if I don’t or can’t then I want to be part of one beyond what I am already doing right now – I want to help craft the beer and build the brand of a bright and shiny new brewery in Minnesota (or wherever else is in need of one, I’m looking at you Sioux City). I want to market it and pour it down people’s throats because as anyone in in marketing knows, you can market nothing better than something you love and truly believe in. And for me, it’s not better healthcare or Totino’s pizza rolls, it’s the craft beer revolution.

The dream was born for me when I was driving with my boyfriend and his parents to a family cabin up north by the boundary waters (if you’re not from Minnesota, the boundary waters is probably the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot of landscapes. Let me rephrase: it is the most beautiful landscape that makes me proud to be from this land. It’s all majestic with eagles and shit) and in order to get there we drove through Cloquet, a small town south of Duluth that is really more of a crossroads, but less Wild West and more Iron Range. They told me about this place, but I had no idea what to expect, and then there it was, as we slowed to a stop underneath its beautiful awning: Frank Lloyd Wright’s one and only service station. It’s small, and reminiscent of the aforementioned Wild West that he sometimes alludes to with his flat roofs and Route 66 stylings, but it was different; everything about it screamed Midwest, and sadly, Struggling. Just a few pumps and a garage, it was dead. No one was fueling here, taking in the shade from the greened copper roof, but there it stood, proud of its heritage, uncertain of its future.

The gas station is part of FLW’s Broadacre City Project, a “utopian vision of a new urban landscape”: suburbs in the city, cities in the suburbs – he had plans to put skyscrapers in the middle of the plains and everything. I mean, the man was crazy, but a genius. A reaction to and embracing the push to the suburbs, somewhat socialist in theory (everyone in this city gets one acre), his vision incorporated beauty and art can still reign, all with a touch of Japan.

I don’t know why he chose to put the service station in Cloquet of all places (it actually has something to do with its namesake, R. W. Lindholm, for whom he later designed a home), but this is where my dream truly came to life. I began to daydream, transforming the mechanic’s shop into a taproom, with its glass garage doors open to the summer breeze that Minnesotan’s seek in the warmer months up north, serving elegantly hopped and perfectly heady black IPAs – the oxymoron that pairs nicely with the historical surroundings. Would there be an oatmeal stout on the menu too, you ask? Of course. Available all year round.

Since it’s a garage, the floors would be already sloped, so that would be the easy part, but the difficult part is a much larger feat: transforming a national historical site into a brewery; I’m sure it wouldn’t be allowed. But think about the delight it would bring to travelers, wanderers, passersby, and more importantly the town and Minnesota as a whole. This was FLW’s dream: to bring functional art to the people through architecture whether they wanted it or not. The pumps would stay, of course, but the gas station would be transformed into a modern fueling station of sorts, bustling with people at all times of the year, because as Minnesotans we know that even in the winter we want our beer and are willing to go out in the cold to get it.

I was further inspired when I went to Marquette, Michigan in the Upper Peninsula where I drank at undoubtedly the coolest nanobrewery I’ve ever been to, Blackrocks. It’s a similar concept, make a house into a brewery, put in a bar, and make it the ultimate hang out place for pretty much everyone in and around the town including visitors like myself, hungry for a pint of the good stuff. They hang personalized mugs from the ceiling for the regulars and provide ever-changing wonderful beers – when I went there it was IPA week—exercising that brewer’s muscle.

Apparently the FLW gas station was recently sold and I’m not sure to whom or for how much or how well it’s doing now (according to this NPR article from August of 2008, the current owner is “not sure how long it can remain privately owned”), but I want it and I want it bad. I want to make it into a destination tap room and nanobrewery. I want the American dream.

My Beer Myopia

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As I stared at the long list of bottled beers at the Epic tap-less taproom, my mind drew a blank. I was stunned by the sheer volume of beers and only 30 minutes in which to drink them before they closed the place down. I have never seen so many beers available at a taproom before. My friend Blackmer and I bellied up to the bar where the above-average looking bartender stood chatting with another customer. This was no ordinary taproom, this was a tap room in Salt Lake City, Utah. What was once a notoriously barren desert of craft beer (due to a strict 3.2% law with a religious bent) now has a couple cactuses and, boy, are the cactuses flowering – at high gravity nonetheless (only because they have to; the law states that if a beer is above 3.2% it has to be in a bottle, so that’s a nice loophole).

The man sitting at the bar next to me, a business man also staying at my hotel but for a trade show, was also clearly very knowledgeable about beer, suggested I try their Copper Cone Pale Ale, saying it was one of the best he’s ever had. He asked me what my favorite IPA was – not just beer, but IPA. This is not the first time I have encountered this question but it was the first time I was hyperaware of my lack of beer knowledge in this particular situation and my desire to not only seem knowledgeable but interesting in my beer tastes. Anything I said wouldn’t have resonated with him, he doesn’t know Surly Furious or the Rush River Bubble Jack – or maybe he does, but he wouldn’t have truly understood what they meant to me on a deeper level, as a proud Midwesterner; he was clearly intimate with the beers of the West, and I was dumbstruck, paralyzed by my own inability to commit and be judged outside of my flannel comfort zone. I avoided the question, saying I would gladly take his recommendation but I sat tentatively on the edge of my seat. What had I gotten myself into?

The sad truth is I am honestly used to knowing more about beer than the majority of the people around me, and even if they have a strong opinion that I would fundamentally disagree with (I don’t believe in hopped-stupid beers and I firmly believe that Fulton is a good brewing company), we’re on the same page. Naturally I am one page ahead of them, or so I like to think, but that page is definitely in the chapter known as ‘Minnesota and other upper Midwest breweries.’ It was at that moment, as I took a bite into the best prosciutto and Gruyere panini I’ve ever had (it even had honey on it, what?!), I realized – I have become too myopic in my beer crusade. If I cannot even commit to a universal, or at least national, IPA that I genuinely enjoy, I am doing something wrong.

The real kicker is, however, the realization that I am ignorant of other awesome beers out there, making me the most insufferable beer snob akin to only those who reside in Portland, complacent with their local beer selection and ever-so-gently reminding you that no, craft beer from Portland is the best. I only really know my local beers, and as I said in my Growler magazine article, my favorite anytime beer is the Summit Oatmeal Stout (don’t even go there, I already recognized in said article that it is a silly choice, but I’m just being honest). If I am to be the craft beer lover and advocate I pretend to be, I need to do more in the way of higher education; as we all know, education doesn’t end in school, it’s everything you do all the time – good thing I drink beer all the time, so that part is easy. But the hard part is going out and seeking things you haven’t tried before and not just putting beers from the coasts on a pedestal as the end-all-be-all, an attitude that I attribute to my reactive Midwestern beer myopia, which in a way is almost just as bad. It is exploring all the styles, beers and breweries you can get your hands on to get a better understanding of the larger context, and more specifically, the ability to just shut the hell up and pick a favorite IPA that everyone knows and can relate to. So, watch out, America – this beer snob is about to get a much-needed beer education.