Happy Independents Day
Wayfinder’s Kevin Davey, sitting behind a half-liter of his triple-decocted světlé výčepní.
Happy Independence Day, my fellow Americans. As is my habit on this holiday, I salute all those independent breweries out there, American and non-. Launching a business is hard work, and keeping it going through the past 15 months was nothing short of heroic. Congratulations!
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with large breweries. Some folks take a moralistic approach to brewery ownership, and judge corporate-owned breweries harshly. (There are even entire organizations devoted to this project.) You won’t find me doing that, and I rarely consider ownership when thinking about a brewery. Nevertheless, when I’m standing in a family-owned brewery in Europe that dates back seven or eight generations, or I’m listening to an American brewer tell me a new process I’ve never encountered, I can’t help but be compelled by their value to the beer world. They are both the keepers of tradition but also the innovators from whom new styles emerge. Freed from the pressure to appeal to millions of customers, they can let their own personalities shine. So much of what we love about beer comes from passion and quirkiness of independent breweries.
Taking Risks
Large, mass-market breweries are concerned with selling a lot of beer. They need to offer products that the largest number of consumers will buy at the right price point. Their scale and integration make them the ultimate aggregator: the beers that are churned from their factories are proven winners. Big breweries can’t afford to make unpopular beers.
Little breweries offer the inverse set of strengths. They can experiment on a beer that has no obvious market. They make beer in small enough volumes and target small enough niches that a batch of beer is never much of a risk. That circumstance has led to explosive evolution and change. When you look at the developments that have characterized the craft beer era in the US, they all came from little independent breweries. We would never have seen a Mosaic-hopped IPA if we’d left the market to Anheuser-Busch and Miller. We wouldn’t have seen Mosaic hops, either.
Preserving Tradition
Paradoxically, brewing traditions are also protected by little breweries that refuse to modernize, mechanize, and follow trends. In the second half of the 20th century, as mass market lagers began to dominate the world beer market, independent breweries kept traditional styles alive. Imagine where we’d be if lambic breweries had closed up shop as they were teetering on the brink 50 years ago. The whole enterprise of using wild yeasts may have lost to us. What if traditional brewing had died in Britain? What beer would those early breweries have made; would we have ever gotten to IPAs? Finally, when you pick up a book like the Beer Bible and read about beer styles, many of those exist because a handful of breweries survived making the last examples. (In some cases it got down to a single brewery). Our list of styles is far smaller than it might have been—so many of the old ones did die out, taking traditions with them. The styles that exist to today have champions in small, independent breweries.
Independent Thought
Little breweries have big opinions. Brewer-led breweries think about the beer, not the marketing campaign. The questions they ask relate to making the beer better or more characterful or more interesting. When breweries get bigger, particularly when they become global corporations, the thinking shifts to “liquid streams” and “product.” The companies are far too big to reflect the idiosyncrasies of a brewer’s vision. Many people are involved in every decision, no matter how small, so that all the quirks are smoothed out of the system. Global breweries can be optimized to make beer of exceptional quality; they almost never make the most interesting beer. The ideal arrangement for a big brewery is a gigantic market for a single beer, one that can be made, packaged, delivered, and marketed with single-minded efficiency. While that may be a great business model, had we left matters in their hands we’d have a single, boring commodity and nobody would care about beer.
So on this Independence Day, as you putter around a back yard or lounge on a beach or even—oh joy!—sit inside a pub, raise your glass (or bottle or can) and salute the independents that have made this beer world such an interesting, rich one.