Can Do

Aluminum cans have long been the domain of the macro brewers, who tend to experiment with every form of packaging and marketing concept to gain a competitive edge. The brown glass bottle has become so iconic within the craft beer industry that the very idea of canned craft beer gains instant attention. Because so few craft brewers have opted for a canning operation, the association between an aluminum can and a macro product is difficult to break. Hopefully, this association can be changed.

For a small craft brewer, canning equipment and product has long been beyond their financial reach. Purchasing the printed aluminum stock alone is a hurdle most cannot overcome, as they often cannot be obtained in anything less than tens of thousands of units. But as their popularity grows, a few daring craft brewers have chosen the can route over bottles, and it is now up to us, the consumers, to support this far superior choice.

Aluminum cans impart no taste to the beverage. Unlike cans of many decades past, today’s cans have an interior that is lined with a thin, nonreactive plastic laminate. In fact, the beer inside never touches metal, only this plastic coating. The tinny, metallic taste that was once a deterrent for beer consumers is an attribute of your father’s beer, not current packaging.

Aluminum is an excellent thermal conductor. This substance is so great at heat conduction that we fill our kitchens with aluminum pots and pans. What this means for the beer consumer is that cans cool down much faster than bottles, whereas glass is an insulator. If you worry that cans may warm faster than a bottle while you drink it, you should already be pouring a craft beer into a serving glass instead of swigging it from a bottle.

Cans offer 100% light protection. One of the greatest enemies of beer is strong visible light, which contains photons energetic enough to react and break down complex hop oil molecules within the beer. Thus, brewers have favored brown bottles over clear glass to cut down on the amount of light transferred. But not a single photon gets into a sealed can.

Aluminum cans favor an active lifestyle. Many beaches, park areas, lakes and outdoor entertainment venues prohibit glass of any product, as a dropped glass container can result in thousands of dangerous shards spread over the grounds. Cans present no such hazard, and with an empty can weighing less than an ounce while an empty bottle weighs 6 oz, cans are also significantly lighter than bottles in backpacks and coolers.

Cans have a greater packing factor. Packing factor is a concept used in fields as diverse as manufacturing efficiency to atomic structure. Simplified, it is the ratio of how many uniform items can be packed into similar areas, whether those items are widgets or bottles or atoms. With their long and asymmetrical shapes, bottles have a low packing factor; however, with their clever stacking design on both top and bottom, cans have a relatively large packing factor, meaning they are easier and more efficient to transport.

Aluminum is the green choice. Certainly, both glass and aluminum are recyclable materials, with both offering advantages as post-consumer products. But whereas aluminum may be more costly to manufacture from raw materials, it is far more cost-effective to recycle. Recycling glass saves about 26% of the energy over manufacturing new glass, but recycling aluminum reclaims a whopping 96% of that same energy. Colored glass must also be separated manually, adding to its cost, as it takes more energy to rid the glass of the metals used to impart the tint.

There is also the consumer participation aspect, with about 45% of aluminum cans being recycled compared to around 25% of glass bottles. Likewise, much more paper and packaging is used for a six-pack of bottles at retail when compared to a simple plastic six-ring can holder. Add to this the weight factor of shipping thousands of units of product and you consume far more fuel trucking glass around over aluminum.

One young local start-up, Southern Star Brewing, decided to go with a canning operation from the beginning with their first beers, with no plans for a traditional bottling line. Break your association that canned beer must be inferior or compromised, or that fine barleywines or IPAs cannot come from an aluminum container. Support craft brewers that choose a canning operation over bottles, as it is obviously the superior choice.

American Craft Beer Week

The craft brewing industry is currently enjoying its most robust and healthy period since all but disappearing during Prohibition. So healthy are the craft brewers of the US that a couple of years ago, Congress established American Craft Beer Week, May 12th through the 18th. The big event is being called SAVOR: An American Craft Beer and Food Experience, a multi-brewery exposition of food and beer to be held in Washington, DC. Let us examine the current state of the US craft beer industry using the language of the congressional record itself, House Resolution 753 of the 109th Congress.

Whereas American craft brewers are a vibrant affirmation and expression of American entrepreneurial traditions. Craft breweries are models of the values of American small business. Very few are publicly owned, with most owned by individuals who are usually also elbow-deep in the work and sweat themselves.

Whereas the United States has craft brewers in every State and more than 1300 craft breweries nationwide. At the turn of the 20th century, it is estimated that the US had somewhere around 2000 independent breweries nationwide. Prohibition essentially destroyed the industry, with the only brewers surviving being those with the deepest pockets. But the industry has been rebounding ever since, especially in the past few decades.

Whereas American craft brewers support American agriculture by purchasing barley, malt, and hops grown, processed and distributed in the United States. Craft breweries are often a farmer’s best friend. Not only are they constant purchasers of domestic grains and hops, the spent grain — the used byproduct of the brewing process — is often sold or donated for livestock feed.

Whereas American craft brewers promote the Nation’s spirit of independence through a renaissance in hand-crafted beers like those first brought to colonial shores. Craft brewers are often amateur historians, at least with regard to the brewing industry, and microbreweries are miniature museums of local and regional history dotted around the country.

Whereas American craft brewers strive to educate legal drinking-age Americans. Just as they preserve their industry’s heritage with their work, craft brewers are eager ambassadors and teachers of beer’s flavors, qualities, ingredients and alcohol issues.

Whereas American craft brewers champion the message of responsible enjoyment to their customers. Ironically, craft brewers should never face the opposition they do from anti-alcohol groups, as they are among the firmest supporters of responsible consumption, and are quick to police themselves and the behavior of their fans.

Whereas American craft brewers produce more than 100 distinct styles of flavorful beers, the quality and diversity of which have made the United States the envy of every beer-drinking nation in the world. The varied and adventurous tastes of the American consumer has today created the most diverse beer market in the history of the brewing industry. ‘Nuff said.

Whereas American craft brewers are vested in the future, health, and welfare of their communities as employers providing a diverse array of quality local jobs. One aspect of local breweries that is often overlooked is that they are not only good employers and municipal friends, they also support a myriad of associated business and local merchants that depend on their product for their own business.

So, how will you celebrate American Craft Beer Week? Hopefully, the same way you celebrate every week, with a fine American-made craft beer in hand.

Texas' Taste in Beer

More so than any other state in the Union, Texas constitutes a unique subculture above and beyond simple state borders. With a colorful history, a strong independent streak and even today isolated by long distances from our nearest neighbors, Texas culture has grown up with its own unique and regional tastes and preferences.

Until just a few years ago, Texas consumed more beer in total volume than any other state. (California now holds that distinction, with Texas a close second.) Of course, this is not a reflection of the craft beer market; the bulk of what is consumed are macro products, with their multitude of light lager styles and alcopops. But it does show that Texans have a particular taste for beer, and the local craft beer market also reflects that.

Basically, Texas is hot. Not the type of desert heat like Arizona, with temperatures of 120°F during the day and dropping into the cool 60s at night. Texas heat is a stagnant, humid heat that hangs in the upper 90s, usually crossing the triple-digit mark in summers, and that heat is retained with a perpetual +70% humidity so that overnight the mercury barely budges by ten degrees. Perspiration is an uncontrollable fact of life for everyone, and the humidity can sap your energy in mere minutes.

The heat alone tends to preclude certain cold-weather beer styles from gaining a foothold. With their heavy flavors, stouts of all varieties are rare; in fact, only one stout is commercially produced by any Texas craft brewer, and that one merely a seasonal, the Saint Arnold Winter Stout. Likewise, high-gravity beers like barleywines, wee heavies and old ales are rare, although a few are produced on a limited basis.

The German and Czech immigrants to Texas at its formation infused the state with a taste for their native beers, particularly the maltier bock and dunkel styles. Although no longer a “true bock” (it is now classified as an American dark lager), the hundred-year-old Spoetzl Brewery produces the ubiquitous Shiner Bock that is amazingly popular with native Texans from cowboys to Chicanos, and has grown to be distributed through about a third of the US. So popular is Shiner Bock that brewing giant Anheuser-Bush produces a similar beer named Ziegenbock specifically to compete in the Texas market.

But if there were a single style to declare as a “state beer,” nothing slakes the thirst of Texans like the wheat ales. Texans have embraced all manner of wheat styles, from Bavarian weizen to spicy Belgian witbier to the standard American wheat. So popular is this single family of beers that every craft brewer in Texas commercially produces some variety of wheat ale, and local brewpubs are foolish not to have one of their own on draught. Even clear, filtered varieties of wheat ales such as kristalweizen are developed ahead of the massively popular IPAs.

Standing out from this family of wheat ales is the German hefeweizen, or weizen mit hefe (“with yeast”). Texans adore their hefeweizen in all its creamy sweetness filled with estery traces of clove, vanilla and banana. The acknowledged leader in the state is the Live Oak Hefeweizen from the tiny brewery in Austin, one of the oldest craft brewers in Texas. Once only a spring offering, demand for this Live Oak beer was so great that the brewer now produces it year-round. So distinct is its quality that it continually appears on “best of” beer lists and websites, beating out other national craft beers and even native Bavarian products of the same style.

As the Civil War general Philip Sheridan said, “If I owned Hell and Texas, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell.” As long as we had our hefeweizen, I think we could get by.

Defining Craft Beer

The phrase craft beer is thrown about quite a lot in beer-centric publications, as if the audience naturally knows and understands precisely what this means. To fans of craft beer, the phrase is inherently understood and adopted as lingo within the subculture. Actually, the phrase is not as easy to define as it would seem, especially to those consumers “outside” the craft beer movement.

Let us start with some public and objective definitions, courtesy of the Brewers Association. Craft breweries are often also called microbreweries, or defined as a brewery that produces less than 15,000 barrels of product annually. (A barrel of beer is about 31 gallons.) The next step up from there is the regional brewery, defined as a brewery that produces between 15,000 and 2 million barrels of beer annually. Altogether, these micro- and regional breweries currently account for somewhere around 7% of total beer sales in the United States.

Any brewery that produces in excess of 2 million barrels of beer annually leaves only the major national brewers, namely, Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors in the US. Collectively, these brewers are called macros (in opposition to “micros”) by the craft beer community, and are generally regarded as cold corporations more concerned with balancing budget sheets on the backs of an inferior product than actually brewing something tasty for the consumer.

At this point, the lines begin to blur and definitions start to bend and morph as we enter a much more subjective arena. To craft beer fans, macros are the enemy (by definition), somehow having gained market dominance by foisting insipid and flavorless lager variations upon the consumer. Macro beers are not just to be avoided but completely resisted in favor of the “higher quality” of the independent small craft brewers across the country.

I place the term “higher quality” in quotation marks because at this point, definitions of what is and is not a craft beer enter a grey area. Craft beer fans regard their favorite beverages superior in all ways, thus painting the macro products as somehow inferior and flawed or, dare we say, impure. Surely, with their robust flavors and heady aromas, craft beers must embody all that is good and pure with American industry and idealism.

It becomes very difficult to delineate craft beer in terms of quality. Macro brewers have built very technologically advanced brewing and delivery systems and are near-obsessive about monitoring quality and consistency of product. They manage not only ingredient sources but also international distribution chains to ensure the highest quality at all levels of production. Telling an employee of a macro brewing corporation that they have no regard for the quality of the product they produce can be personally hurtful to many.

One can argue against macro quality by their use of adjuncts, or additive products besides malted grains (such as rice or corn) used to enhance the beer’s body or clarity. Adjuncts are generally regarded by the consuming public as somehow “cheating” in the brewing process. But the fact is that craft brewers often use adjuncts — where called for in a recipe — in some of their beers as well. Either way, the use of adjuncts should not be regarded as somehow related to the lessening of a beer’s overall quality. It is simply another brewing tool, nothing more.

Indeed, some macro brewers have taken note of the growing popularity of the craft beer movement and have spawned their own subdivisions devoted to producing more craft-like beers specifically tailored for that market. Some have gone as far as setting up mock-craft enterprises, branded and marketed as a small brewery but wholly owned and manufactured at the macro establishments. More than anything else, these macro/crafts have blurred the line in the argument of what defines a craft beer.

Perhaps one of the best ways to obtain a meaningful definition of craft beer is to correlate it with the Slow Food movement. Craft beers are artisanal products, much like meat that is produced by a small farm and butchered locally, or confections from a local independent bakery, or vegetables grown and sold at a local farmer’s market instead of trucked nationally from a single valley in California. Craft beers should be produced locally, marketed locally with local personalities, and reflect the local preferences of that consumer region.

It should be noted here that this blog is wholly in support of the independent craft brewers in the United States and abroad. That said, no hostility is directed nor intended here toward the macro brewers, and macro brewers and their products should not be weighed with a moral component. They are simply recognized as another valid consumer choice… just not this consumer’s choice.

Bad Beer Versus Preference

Unavoidably, craft beer fans are drawn to extremes. We love the monster hoppy beers, the high-gravity beers, the imperial stouts, doppelbocks and barleywines. Our desire is to either saturate or outright overwhelm our taste buds with our typical, American extra-is-good so ten-times-that-must-be-fantastic philosophy. It is our nature.

I point no fingers of blame, as I am just as guilty. I desire, purchase and guzzle the latest dry-hopped triple IPA just as much as anyone else. Indeed, craft brewers themselves have learned to work the crowds with limited-edition this and seasonal-release that, feeding the frenzy and capturing the spotlight and making a premium profit, all at the same time.

But an unfortunate casualty in this arms race of the palate is the journeyman craft brewer, the one who either chooses not to take advantage of this marketing trend or does not have the resources to do so. This is the brewer who turns out the session beers, the massive mid-ranged products that are the backbone of the industry: the pale ales, the ambers, the wheats, the casks, the English pub styles or German biergarten fare.

Too often, craft brewers are judged by their extremes. A highly desirable, limited-edition seasonal product can elevate a brewer to almost mythical status, regardless of the balance of their portfolio. Conversely, brewers that are not currently part of this trend are often overlooked or utterly dismissed by craft beer fans. The comment most often made by critics is simply, “I just don’t think they make good beer.”

At this point, a sharp distinction must be drawn: Does the brewer make truly bad beer, or simply beer that you do not prefer? Is the beer produced of a genuinely poor quality, or are they of styles that you are typically not drawn to, avoid or overtly dislike? This point is a very significant difference in the estimation of a craft brewer. Craft beer fans make this mistake more often than they may realize.

Regrettably, there have been a rare handful of (often short-lived) commercial craft brewers that, largely for reasons unknown, have produced and released truly bad beer. "Bad beer" is defined as beer that has identifiable flaws, whether stylistic, flavor components or with some perceptible fault. Perhaps it is too tannic, or too estery, or flat, or stale, or with any of a variety of chemical elements left as byproducts of fermentation and conditioning. These are all the hallmarks of bad beer — or more accurately, flawed beer — and they are not easily missed once you have identified them.

In contrast, consider a simple American amber ale. If you are a lover of hoppy beers, you may reject this as not bitter enough. If Russian imperial stouts are your taste, you may find the amber bland and unremarkable. Those searching for the high-alcohol burn will hardly notice the amber at all, and dismiss it as yet another forgettable label on the shelf.

Yet there is no flaw to be found in this typical American amber. In your evaluation of beers and brewers, you must always take into consideration your own taste calibration and try to value beers as objectively as you can. You need not take up a love of amber ales if your liking draws you to other styles, any more than you should be forced to read Solzhenitsyn if your interests lie elsewhere. But to rate it as “bad beer” or the brewer as somehow a “bad” brewer (or worse, “unable” to make a good beer) is simply wrongheaded.

Be aware of your own prejudices, preferences and tastes, and judge accordingly.